


how could we be in each other's dreams?

by meminisse



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: BJ Hunnicutt's trademark 'complete lies', Dreams, Letters, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-Canon, hawkeye and margaret are best friends ok, house repairs, less-than-reliable narration, marital woes (maybe?) it's not really woes they're bad at fighting, storytelling as an act of love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:47:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 29,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28156305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meminisse/pseuds/meminisse
Summary: "Once upon a time, I tried to find you in a dream."_____Or, the story of how Hawkeye and BJ met again, told a few different times.
Relationships: B. J. Hunnicutt/Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce, Margaret "Hot Lips" Houlihan & Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce
Comments: 55
Kudos: 99





	1. 1958

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> September 1958 and fall 1953.

"Peg said she's been moping since school started and won't say why."

Hawkeye shrugs as he rolls the scrubs in his hands into a neat bundle. "School only started last week. You should ask her; you're the expert in repressing your feelings."

BJ throws a wadded-up shirt at him. "Very funny. And for your information, she wouldn't tell me."

Hawkeye frowns. "Really?"

"Really. You're up next."

"Very well. Watch and learn, Watson," he says dramatically as he rolls up the sleeves of his bathrobe and sweeps out of the room.

BJ can't see what's happening, but he hears rustling sheets, a snap of pages, wood sighing, silence: Erin sits up and pretends to be concentrating on her book. Hawkeye sits down at the foot of the bed. They watch each other, Erin furtively and Hawkeye sizing her up. BJ tries to fold as quietly as possible so he doesn't miss anything.

"So what's the matter?" Hawkeye says at last.

"Nothing," she says airily, or like she wants people to think that it's airy. It's an uncomfortably familiar sound. 

"Erin, as a wise man once said, that's horse hockey. Anyone can see that; you don't even have to be a champion moper like me."

There's a long pause. BJ carries a pile of socks to the dresser so he can fold and eavesdrop at the same time.

"Promise you won't tell Dad." 

Hawkeye snorts. "What's so serious that you can't tell him?" 

The sound of Erin sighing and flopping back onto the bed with a  _ thwump.  _ "He'll be really mad, probably. He'll yell." 

Now Hawkeye sounds worried. "Erin, can you please tell me what's wrong before I have a heart attack?"

She sighs again. "I wanna drop out of school."

"What? Why? You love school!"

"Not second grade! Mrs. Silva is  _ mean _ , and I  _ hate _ spelling, and Angela isn't in my section anymore, she's with Mrs. O'Neal who's really  _ nice _ and brings  _ treats _ in, and Mom said I can still go to Angela's house and we see each other at recess but it isn't the  _ same! _ " She punctuates each clause by thumping her hand against the mattress. _ " _ So I think I should just drop out, but obviously I can't tell Dad that because he'll never let me, and I just—" She seems to deflate a little. "I just wish I could go back to last year."

"You want to repeat first grade?"

She growls in frustration. "No! I just miss it!" She pauses. "I miss summer too. And Gramps."

Now it's Hawkeye's turn to sigh. "Me too."

"And Dad said I can always write him letters and call him on the phone. But it's not the same as really seeing him."

Another pause. Something in Hawkeye must soften, because when he speaks again, BJ doesn't have to see him to know that he's wearing the face he reserves for his rare bouts of total sincerity. "No, it's not." For a little while neither of them say anything. The bedframe creaks; Hawkeye must have shifted to lean his head on the wall. 

At last, Erin says slowly, “Gramps said that if you think about someone right before you go to sleep, you can see them in your dreams.”

“He told me that too.”

“Is it true?” 

“Well, sometimes it works.”

“Have you ever tried it?”

“Yeah.”

“Who were you trying to dream about?” At the prospect of a story, Erin suddenly sounds less morose. BJ expects Hawkeye to say Lauren Bacall or Dwight Eisenhower or Jack Benny, or to start spinning some wild story of people he had met long ago. But instead he sighs, and BJ can hear the smile in his voice. 

“Your dad." BJ stops folding.

"Really?"

"Oh, yeah. Those first few months, when we got back to America. I was in Maine with Gramps, and he was over here with you and your mom. I thought about him all the time, what he was doing, whether his job was going okay, how many times a day he walked Waggles—“ 

Erin laughs. “That’s Mom’s job. Dad would never get up early enough to walk the dog.”

“Right. But I missed him so much that I didn't even think about that. At first, I thought maybe if I tried not to think about him, I wouldn’t miss him so much.” BJ's heard this story many times from Hawkeye, but never heard it told to someone else. It's strange to hear him talk about those months like they were simple, like just something that happened long ago.

“But it didn’t work.”

“Who’s telling the story here?” Hawkeye says in mock indignation.

“Sorry, Hawk.” 

“I will generously declare you forgiven. But no more interruptions.” 

“Deal.”

“So, where were we... oh, yeah, the dragon advanced on General MacArthur, breathing great plumes of smoke—“

“Hawk! You were talking about Dad.”

“Okay, okay. So it didn’t work. The more I tried to forget him, the more I missed him. His dumb puns, his big feet… I even missed his cheesy mustache." BJ looks down— his body has carried him to the doorway, still holding the pants he’d been folding five minutes before. 

"Ew."

"I know. Then one night, Gramps and I were up late, talking, and he reminded me of something my mother had told us both a long time ago— that if you imagined something before sleeping, you would see it in your dreams. So I laid down and I pictured your dad's stupid mustache. And when I opened my eyes I was in the Swamp, and there he was, trimming the very same stupid mustache into a coffee mug and humming.” 

“It really worked?” 

“Yeah. I tried every night after that. Didn’t always work, though. Sometimes it backfired and I had bad dreams. Other times I didn’t see him at all.” 

“But sometimes it did?”

“Uh-huh. And after a while, I didn’t have to dream about your dad to see him, ‘cause—“

“Then he showed up at your door, and the oven was smoking, and you sat outside until Gramps invited him inside for dinner, and—“

“—the rest is history.” BJ leans his head against the doorframe. Hawkeye's smiling now, he can feel it. 

“Hawk?”

“Erin?”

“Do you think maybe if I think of Maine...” She trails off. BJ pictures her worrying the hem of her bedspread between her thumb and forefinger. 

“Try it. If it works, tell me in the morning.” 

“Good night, Hawk.” 

“Sweet dreams, kiddo.” BJ comes back to himself at the sound of floorboards creaking. He moves back out of the doorway, but not in time to avoid Hawkeye. 

Before Hawkeye can make a wisecrack about eavesdropping or his ears being as big as his feet, BJ puts on his biggest, most obnoxious smile and says, "The story of how we met, huh?"

The corner of Hawkeye's mouth twists, which usually signals the beginning of a tirade, but he just says, “Now don't you go asking for a story."

“Hawk, you’re a closet romantic.”

“I’m a closet lot of other things, too," he grumbles, and pads into the bathroom.

"I don't remember the story having so many cracks about my mustache in it."

Hawkeye shrugs elaborately. "She thinks your mustache is funny. She's a very smart kid." He pauses and looks back at BJ in the mirror. "That big, dopey grin of yours looks suspiciously real. What are you smiling about?" BJ almost goes to feel his face— he is indeed still smiling.

"You were telling her our story."

"Oy." He rolls his eyes. "It's not just our story. It belongs to everyone who was part of it. My father's got a part in it; so does Margaret. Hell, even Charles has a right to it." This is an argument they've had so many times that it's not really even an argument anymore; they know their lines by heart.

"Yeah, but it's ours first and foremost," BJ finishes. 

"That it is." He spits and looks back at BJ in the mirror. "You're still smiling." The sight of Hawkeye with toothpaste foaming at his mouth, eyebrows creased as he tries to figure out what's happening, only makes BJ smile harder. "I don't see what the big deal is. I must have heard the story of how my parents met a few thousand times as a kid."

"I never did," BJ says to Hawkeye's back.

Hawkeye turns to look directly at him. He softens. "Oh. I didn't know that."

BJ shrugs. "One day they were people of their own, and then they were married. At some point after that, they had me. Then Lois. Then life began."

"That's a rotten story. Where's the rising and falling action? Anyone would think your parents never passed ninth-grade English."

"For all I know, maybe they didn't."

Hawkeye, who knows all of BJ's worries and never lets him wallow in self-pity, just smiles a little. "Well, listen. Your kid's going to know this story so well, by the time she's old enough to vote, she'll be able to recite it diagonally and inside out. She can already do half of it backwards." He turns back to the sink and splashes water on his face. 

"That's a long time to learn a story."

"Well, she needs it. There are parts of it I don't know that I'm going to tell her yet— if at all. I leave out the bad stuff at the beginning."

"What part?"

"You know, the—" he stops abruptly and narrows his eyes at BJ in the mirror. "Aha. Nice try, rat." The menacing effect is somewhat spoiled by the fact that Hawkeye is blinking water out of his eyes.. 

"What? What did I do?" BJ says as innocently as possible.

Hawkeye towels his face off and walks back into the bedroom, flicking the light off with an unmistakable air of triumph. "You can't fool me, Hunnicutt. You just want me to tell you a story."

"That's quite an accusation," BJ says as he follows him into bed.

"It's not an accusation, it's a fact."

"How do you know I didn't just forget how it goes?"

Hawkeye scoffs, a little sound like  _ tch!  _ "I know you better than that," he says as he snaps back the covers and climbs in. 

"Okay, I confess, I didn't forget." BJ opens his arms so that Hawkeye can lie down with his head on BJ's chest. 

He makes a show of being irritated, but BJ knows that Hawkeye is already starting to give in when he says, "Not Catholic, remember? Confession will get you nowhere. And anyway, you're the storyteller."

"You tell this one better." 

"Okay, alright. Once upon a time, I tried to find you in a dream." 

*******

When Hawkeye came home from Korea, he slept for five days. He woke up only to eat, shower, and use the bathroom. He was vaguely aware of people passing through the house and saying his name, but he was too exhausted to care. On the sixth day, he came downstairs before dawn and started cooking himself French toast. His father was so happy to see him up and about that Hawkeye didn't have the heart to tell him that he was still exhausted. 

For a little while, things seemed like they would be okay, or if not okay than at least different than the monotonous horror of the last three years. The doctors Pierce went to work together in the morning, and all their meals tasted like real food. If he didn't count the way that his heart shattered every time he made a joke and turned to see BJ's reaction, or how he sometimes caught his father looking at him with an overwhelming mixture of love and worry, or how he still listened for BJ's snoring in the middle of the night, he could almost pretend things were fine. He slept deeply, and when he couldn't do that he got drunk and cooked three-course meals, and when he ran out of alcohol or ingredients he sat in the bathtub and almost wished it was made of canvas. Fine. More or less.

It was almost August when the dreams started coming, almost every night without fail. He saw a production of  _ Gone With The Wind  _ in which Klinger was every character at the playhouse in Brunswick; went driving down the back roads of Crabapple Cove with Charles riding shotgun and trying to steer them to Boston; got sloshed with his dad and Potter in the O Club.

But mostly the dreams weren't that good. One night he dreamed he was caramelizing onions, standing at the stove in his house, blackened from years of heavy use and poor cleaning. He stood for a while, whistling happily to himself. After a few minutes the smell started to change— not onions— he looked down and it was little bits of— oh God— The scene changed and he was in OR all alone, a kid with an open chest wound on the table in front of him. He looked around frantically for assistance and realized that he only had a slotted spoon and a chef's knife for instruments. Then the bombs started falling. 

It was, he thought, absolutely typical. All his body wanted to do was rest, and all his brain wanted to do was wake him up. And when it wasn't busy trying to scare the living shit out of him, it spent its time finding new and inventive ways to torture him. 

He had been back for two weeks when he saw BJ again. They were standing on the hill overlooking the compound to the west, across from the airfield. A still heat hung over their heads. They didn't do anything but look down at the camp, watching everyone go about their business. Their shoulders brushed as they breathed together. Hawkeye was beginning to wonder what they were doing there when BJ turned to him, and nudged him gently. "Shall we go home?" A breeze ruffled his hair and he smiled.

Hawkeye woke up with tears in his eyes. Before he could talk himself out of it, he turned the light on and took a pencil and paper from his nightstand.

_ Dear BJ, _

_ We saw each other again— not that you'd know. So now that you've kept your promise, please get out of my head. You're gone and we might never see each other again, so I would really appreciate it if you would make the whole process a little easier by leaving me the hell alone. One goodbye was enough.  _

He ripped the paper into shreds and went downstairs to pour himself a drink.

  
  


The daytime was easier, somehow. He'd gotten good at pushing thoughts of BJ down, at holding the words in his mouth but never saying them. There was no point in tormenting himself with what he couldn't have, let alone in doing so when the object of one's affections wasn't even there to moon over. BJ had said goodbye, and now it was time for Hawkeye to let him go. Time to focus on his real life. Simple. Easy. Done.

But he couldn't stay awake forever, and Hawkeye had always been lousy at pretending to be something he wasn't, so BJ crept into his dreams all the time: fiddling with test tubes in the lab, waiting in line at Adam's Ribs, strolling at Hawkeye's side through Penn Station. Always with that same little smile: You _ can't shake me, remember? _

Hawkeye hadn't believed in anything for a very long time, but if the weather was nice, he'd take a bottle of beer out to the porch swing, close his eyes to the stars and think,  _ come on, take me to him.  _ He wrapped himself tightly in a blanket to stave off the creeping feeling of guilt; better a shadow or a dream than no BJ at all. 

Sometimes they were together in the dreams, and that was good except it made Hawkeye feel like he was on fire. Sometimes BJ was hurt badly, and Hawkeye would have to get drunk at two in the morning and remind himself that it wasn't real until the alcohol caught up with him and he fell asleep. But in the worst ones, BJ didn't see him at all— he only looked at Hawkeye, or not at him but right through him. 

If he was being honest with himself, the content of the dreams didn't really matter. He always woke up from the ones with BJ in them feeling lonely. Empty, somehow. Those were the days he didn't bother trying to go back to sleep. He would find something to read until his father got up at six like always and then they'd go in to work together. If the clinic didn't need help, he'd sit around the house, reading or listening to records and staring out the window, trying not to think about anything, wondering if he should get drunk. (Usually the answer was yes.) 

Sometimes all he had the energy to do was sit on the porch swing and watch the world go by through a thick haze of time and memory. People moved, walked, laughed, fought, cursed, sang; they spoke to each other in the same language and saw the same things. Hawkeye sat and dreamed in a language of half-references and jokes he didn't need to complete. 

  
  


"You would think that after three years of Korea, my brain would have had enough of living in terror," he said after a particularly bad nightmare in which he walked through the bathroom door and fell into the sea; the falling took a long time and the drowning only a little. 

"Maybe," his father replied from where he sat at the edge of the bed. It was September by then, but he still got up whenever Hawkeye started screaming in the middle of the night. Hawkeye didn't know whether to love him for it or to be bitterly, helplessly furious. "Or maybe your brain is just used to it." 

"Since when are you a Psy. D? You been talking to Sidney lately?"

"Nah, I'm too cheap to call New York. I read my journals instead."

"And even those come used."

"Ben." His father rubbed his temples. 

"Dad."

"Stop it. Tell me what I can do."

"I can't. You know I can't."

"Try."

"Okay. I want to fall into a coma and wake up five years ago— or better yet, make a time machine and talk some sense into whoever started this stupid war. But that isn't possible, right? I should set my hopes lower, be realistic." The words were pouring out of him; he registered from somewhere far away that his voice was getting louder and higher. "I want to stop  _ thinking  _ about it, Dad, don't you understand that? I don't want to go running through minefields after my friends, or be shelled in caves; I've already survived that once, and once was more than enough. But I can't, I can't, sometimes I end up on the back porch just staring at the goddamn trees, wondering what I would be doing if I was still there, with—" He stopped. His hands had wound themselves into the sheets so tightly that his circulation was cutting off.

"With?" His father's tone was almost knowing. Mostly sad. 

"With everyone," Hawkeye finished, although they both knew whose name he had meant to say. "And even  _ that's  _ not realistic, because I can't control my brain after hours! I keep having these stupid nightmares: one night I'm here, the next I'm there, the day after that in San Francisco or Chicago or Boston, or some place that doesn't exist. I just…" He trailed off. "I don't want to dream anymore." 

His father shifted closer to wrap one arm around Hawkeye's shoulder, as though he was still a child in need of comfort. Hawkeye allowed himself to lean into it, as though his father still had all the answers.

"What do you need, Ben?" 

He needed to go back to Korea and take the engine out of BJ’s bike before they said goodbye, so that they could have a few extra minutes together. He needed to eat mushy peas in his thin jacket, pressed up against BJ for warmth. He needed BJ to come to Maine so that he could scream at him for leaving without a note. The old Hawkeye, who told his father everything, would have tried to explain this. The new Hawkeye just said, "I don't know, Dad." 

They sat for a while, listening to the house breathe until his father said abruptly, "Do you remember the summer you went to New York to visit your mother's family? You must have been about four or five."

"Yeah, sort of. Mostly I remember stuffing myself full of bagels and trying to climb a fire escape. Why?"

"Well, I had to stay behind, and I spent the week before you left wringing my hands and trying to come up with reasons for you to cancel the trip. We hadn't been apart since we were married. She thought I was being ridiculous. But when we got to the station, she looked at me with her little crooked smile and said, 'Don't worry, we'll miss you too.' Then she kissed my cheek and said: 'If you think of something before you go to sleep, maybe you can dream about it.' I told her I would think of her, and of you. She smiled and took your hand, and then you were on the train." He paused and chewed the inside of his cheek. "I used to think about that a lot, once she was gone."

"Dad. Why are you telling me this?"

"I know it's not quite the same, Ben. But I know what it is to miss someone." He squeezed Hawkeye's shoulder as he got up. "Try it. Tell me if it hurts less in the morning."

Hawkeye flopped back onto the mattress.  _ Dream of something pleasant,  _ he told his brain.

_ I don't take orders from you, _ his brain replied. Maybe he shouldn't have been talking to his brain like another person. Sidney would probably have something to say about it. He decided to try anyway, damn the analysts.  _ Good things. French toast. Rain after a long dry spell. Books with thick paper. The quilt Mom made when she was pregnant. Candied pecans. Klinger's Scarlett O'Hara outfit. _ He was starting to drift off.  _ Good scotch. BJ _ , his brain helpfully supplied just before he fell into the darkness. 

There was BJ standing in the sun, shading his eyes. His eyes crinkled at the corners; his gigantic dopey grin half-bursting off his face, all teeth and long limbs. He laughed. The sun seemed to get brighter, which of course was impossible, but if the sun were to shine more for anyone it would be for BJ. 

In the morning, he jolted out of bed and clattered down the stairs. “Dad,” he called. “Dad, you’ll never guess what happ--” The kitchen was empty. But there was a note tacked to the fridge:  _ Had to make a house call. Slow day today so don’t come in. See you at dinner.  _

After the initial excitement wore off, Hawkeye found himself pacing over the loose floorboard in his room.  _ So it worked that one time, thinking pleasant thoughts. Well, I tried that a thousand fucking times in Korea and nothing came of it, so this was probably just a fluke. Why get my hopes up? I’ll only be disappointed. Anyway, it’s not possible to manipulate your subconscious or whatever the fuck Freud had to say about it. Sidney would know.  _

This line of thought could only lead to unpleasant memories, which would lead to tears, which would result in Daniel Pierce coming home to find his son weeping into a bottle of Scotch on the living room floor, which would end in Hawkeye having to explain how he saw BJ standing in the sun after taking advice from his dead mother. He decided not to think about the dream for the rest of the day, even if he had to deep-clean the house to avoid doing so. 

When his father came home, Hawkeye was making his fourth soufflé of the day. His father gave him an odd look but didn’t ask any questions. By the time they sat down to eat, they were so busy complaining about perfectly average Vernon Parsons getting more grant money to do absolutely nothing of scientific value that Hawkeye forgot to mention the dream.

That night, after his father had gone to bed, Hawkeye fell asleep outside while reading an article about partial gastrectomy techniques. He opened his eyes and was surrounded by blades of waving grass taller than his head. Above him, the sky roiled with deep blue-gray clouds, like a storm was about to hit. The grass hissed and rustled as though it were closing in on him. Hawkeye didn't need any more encouragement to start running. 

After either a few minutes or three years, he crashed through the tall grass and found himself at the top of a hill. The skyline was ablaze with autumn in New England, bright orange and yellow, although the air around him smelled of August, everything ripe and dying at the same time. It wasn't Maine, but he'd been here before— not that he was complaining. New England was a step up from Korea, and a hill was better than a hospital, or the ocean.

_ Ben,  _ said his mother. Her voice didn't make any sound, and he couldn't see her, but he heard her as clearly as though she had shouted, like a thought transmitted directly to his brain; Hawkeye knew it was her beyond doubt.  _ Come down here.  _ He looked down— there was his mother, not a day older than thirty-six. She stood in the middle of an empty field, shading her eyes with one hand. Hawkeye somehow also knew her blue dress had a hole in the left pocket.

_ Did you hear me? _

He blinked and he was at the edge of the field. His mother was still standing there, holding a glass of champagne in her hand, only now she was wearing a white dress and an elegant hat, looking like she was going to a party, or a wedding. She was chatting with BJ, who was wearing a suit and tails. 

_ Ben,  _ called his mother, still without making a sound.  _ Over here.  _

BJ's whole face lit up when he saw Hawkeye, big cheesy grin and everything. "Hawk!" he shouted, waving his ridiculously long arms. "There you are!" His voice was real, substantial. Hawkeye had to stop himself from reaching out to try and touch it. "Where have you been?"

_ RIGHT HERE,  _ he tried to yell.  _ IT'S MY DREAM, YOU RAT!  _ Instead he called back, "I've been looking for you!" 

A clap of thunder, or a bomb; it was hard to tell in dreams. His mother clasped her hat to her head and tilted her head back to look at the sky. BJ frowned and did the same."I think you'd better come see this, Hawk," he said, like he was looking at a bad chest wound but didn't want to scare the patient.

There was a flash of lightning— so not a bomb— Hawkeye remembered something about the danger of standing in an open field during a storm. "Get out of there!" he yelled. The dream was starting to feel familiar;  _ same shit different field, _ he thought as he tried to run towards BJ and his mother. But they didn't hear him, they just stood there, and where was all that light coming from anyway?

He woke up in a cold sweat, more confused than scared. He heard a train somewhere in the distance. "Huh," he said to the rustling leaves. "It worked that time." He wanted to run upstairs and shake his father awake to report this miraculous news, or go out to the nearest bar and find someone to dance with, or call out to BJ in the dark and hear him say  _ Hawk don't you know some of us are trying to sleep,  _ mostly exasperated but also fond. He settled for heading inside and switching on the light in his room, rifling through the boxes he'd left with his father after being drafted until he found the photographs he was looking for.

In the first, Hawkeye stood on a chair next to his mother, looking down at a tattered recipe book on the kitchen counter. They had identical frowns, down to the little creases between their eyebrows. The picture was black and white, but he knew her dress was blue. On the back, in his father's handwriting:  _ Ben and Hannah preparing for Passover 1927.  _

In the second, he was lounging on a hay bale in an empty field, looking like he was biting down on a laugh. Tommy Gillis sat cross-legged next to him, hat tipped back and shoes gleaming. Behind them stood a girl with dark hair, and a boy with glasses. All of them wore sweaters in the same shade of gray, which was really Columbia blue. In his own spiky handwriting, he read:  _ L-R Groucho, Harpo, Abigail Katz, Jack Price. Brown 0, Columbia 0— Rhode Island's a long way to travel for goose eggs, but the view in this field made up for it.  _

From another box, he took a prescription pad left over from his residency and a fountain pen with a slightly bent nib, and started writing.  _ September 18, 1953. Fell asleep reading about gastrectomies. Mom in a blue dress (circa Passover '27) and BJ in a tux (?) standing in a field in Rhode Island (went there in senior year for a football game that I convinced Tommy to wear blue for). She told me to come down from the hill. He said he'd been looking for me. Lightning and thunder. Possible meanings: Mom and BJ = loved and gone. Blue = BJ's favorite color. Tuxedo = wedding/party? Nothing to celebrate, though. Lightning = bombs probably. _

After a few minutes of staring at the page and twirling his pen around, he flipped the page over and wrote down every other dream he'd had about BJ since coming home. If he was going to do this, he decided to be scientific about it, and keep a real record of what worked and what didn't. It wasn't like there was anything else to do, or anyone who could talk him out of the obsession, who would understand why he was doing it and not make fun of him, just put one hand on his forearm and say  _ go back to sleep, I'll be here when you wake up _ .

  
  


_ Sep. 21: He said he sailed. Got boats and Korea. 3 glasses whiskey to get back to sleep. Dad was not happy.  _

_ Sep 26: No dreams. Too much alcohol. Success?  _

_ Oct 1: Thought of playing chess with him. Had the nightmare about getting lost in a chopper over the ocean again. No whiskey in the house so I just stayed up late. Failure. _

_ Oct 3: Thought of sitting in post-op with him. I ended up in a little rowboat, in a gigantic river at the base of a mountain. I rowed to the shore, climbed up the mountain, and Tommy Gillis was sitting with his sketchpad at the top. He said he'd give me three bucks if I would just sit still so he could draw. I said okay. Not a bad dream, but not what I was looking for. _

_ Oct 7: Nightmare again. Charles and a sled, careening downhill towards the minefield. _

_ Oct. 8: Success! Tried thinking of mess tent food. Got him swapping Frank's toothpaste with wasabi.  _

_ Oct 12: No idea what I thought of. Dreamed of the time we bugged out but Margaret, Radar, and I had to stay behind with the kid who had spinal surgery. He came in to say goodbye. He hugged Margaret, but instead of clapping me on the shoulder, he kissed my cheek, under my left eye. Then he ate Radar's hat and walked out. Nobody thought this was strange. _

_ Oct 13: Thought of the still. He and I played Triple Cranko in the sun until we started laughing and went to get drunk. But then I started crying and I woke up. Partial success? _

_ Oct 15: Thought of that picture of Peg and Erin and ended up in Mount Sinai (???) but the crone unit secretary on the fourth floor who hated my guts was Klinger. Failure, methinks. _

_ Oct 19: Abject failure— Tommy falling into the creek behind Mark Pelletier's house. Well, I don't dream and tell. Thinking about staying up all night tomorrow. _

He never wrote BJ's name. He told himself it was because he didn't trust his father not to go poking around in a misguided attempt to understand his son, and that it would be embarrassing to discuss his total lack of a homosexual love life with a sixty-two year old Mainer. But his father probably already knew, and he never went through Hawkeye's stuff because that had always been his mother's job. Really, Hawkeye was afraid. Once it was named, it was real. Once it was real, it would vanish. 

One night, he didn't think of anything except the teenage boy he'd seen in the afternoon with a sprained ankle, and opened his eyes in the compound on a clear spring night. He strolled aimlessly down the dirt road towards the edge of camp. _ If this were real, BJ would be with me, _ he thought as he rounded the corner to the generator shed. 

Someone was already there. No, two people— a man in fatigues, face cast into shadow. And another man. Himself. 

Dream-him was backed up against the shed wall, arms wrapped around the man in front of him. Hawkeye crept a little closer, trying to see who was making his dream-self moan like that. He heard heavy breathing, the sound of kissing, people hollering in the O Club far away. As he stepped forward, he could see that the man in front of dream-him was broad, taller than him— so either it was Trapper or— 

BJ murmured,"Easy, easy." Dream-him looked up and over BJ's shoulder, directly at Hawkeye—

And then he was dream-him, staring right into BJ's eyes, with BJ's big hands on his hips, listening to BJ say  _ Hawkeye  _ with that incredibly irritating perfect smile. Then BJ leaned in and kissed him hard and hungry like he really wanted it, and pressed him back against the wall. The wall dissolved and they landed not on top of a hunk of high-voltage machinery, but on Hawkeye's bed in Maine, and now they were lying side by side, hand in hand, staring at the little cracks in the ceiling. Hawkeye heard himself saying, "I'm telling you, that one is in the shape of Madagascar," which made no sense because the last time he'd done this in real life it was with Tommy, not BJ. 

When Hawkeye woke up in the morning, he left out the part about seeing himself and BJ getting hot and heavy behind a shed. He told himself that there were some things he just shouldn't dwell on. 

_ Oct. 27: Fell through the wall of the generator shed and into my room. (Physics, I tell you.) Lay on my back with him and made shapes out of the cracks in the ceiling. Can't figure out why my brain mixed him and Tommy together-- making something out of nothing was always my thing with Tommy.  _

He was halfway down the stairs when he realized that BJ used to do that with him too. 

He was so busy turning the thought over in his mind that he almost didn't notice his father sitting at the kitchen table with a book in hand, drumming his fingers on the worn red cover. "Are you… reading?"

"Nah, just looking at the little symbols," his father replied without looking up. "I wonder what this curved one is."

On closer inspection, the book looked suspiciously familiar. "Is that… Thomas Wolfe? Isn't that my copy?"

His father snorted. "Yeah. I'm giving it ten more pages before I abandon it."

"What part are you at?"

He cleared his throat and began to read. It was a passage Hawkeye knew well: " 'And now, because you have known madness and despair, and because you will grow desperate again before you come to evening, we who have stormed the ramparts of the furious earth and been hurled back, we who have been maddened by the unknowable and bitter mystery of love…"

"We call upon you to take heart, for we can swear to you that these things pass."

"Yes." They looked at each other. Light slanted in through the gaps in the curtains; it was almost time for them to leave the house.

"Since when do you read?" Hawkeye meant it as a joke, just a way to break the silence, which was already veering too close to sincerity for his comfort. 

His father shrugged and sipped at his coffee. "Since you got drafted. It made me… feel closer, I suppose. To both of you." He didn't need to say who the second person was. It was too early for serious conversations anyway, so he just poured Hawkeye a cup of coffee and they both knew what it meant. "You sleep okay?"

"Sure. Fine," Hawkeye said, which was his way of saying  _ I don't want to talk about this.  _

"I didn't," his father said, too casually for Hawkeye's liking, which was his way of saying  _ Okay, but you're a dirty rotten liar _ . "I'm wicked tired."

A memory surfaces: BJ in winter, still clean-shaven, wearing two shirts and swathed in a blanket while Hawkeye lounged around in just his shirtsleeves, telling a story of his childhood.  _ Those goddamn sleds go wicked fast on ice, I mean—  _

BJ had thrown his head back in laughter.  _ Wicked?  _ he'd said with a grin, and it didn't matter that he was teasing as long as he kept looking at Hawkeye like that.  _ Who says that?  _

_ The entire state of Maine and I say it,  _ Hawkeye had shot back, pretending to be offended but secretly giddy.  _ Yes, yes, _ he'd thought.  _ Notice me like I notice you.  _

"We'd better get going," Hawkeye said, and drained the rest of his coffee in one swallow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This has been about five months in the making and there have been many points when I thought it would never get done at all, so I'm very excited to share this with you! Massive thanks to the incredible [finesunnyday](https://archiveofourown.org/users/finesunnyday/pseuds/finesunnyday) and [Granspn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Granspn/pseuds/Granspn), without whom this never would have been possible. Thanks also to anyone reading this! I'm on tumblr @dykemulcahy if you want to say hi. Next update should be in about 2 weeks :)
> 
> EDIT: I forgot to credit the Thomas Wolfe passage— it’s from You Can’t Go Home Again.


	2. 1961

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> October 1961 and January 1954.

"Whatever this is—" Jay Hunnicutt waves a contemptuous hand at BJ, Hawkeye, and Erin. "—it isn't you." The words hang over the table like a grenade with the pin pulled out. 

BJ wants to tell him that he has no fucking idea who his son is, and maybe never did. He wants to flip the table over. He wants to punch his father in the mouth for insulting Hawkeye. But Erin is sitting right there— and he glances over at her, sees her shoulders set in a hard line. For a moment he's thrown— Erin looks just like his sister at that age, squaring off to defend him against their parents. 

He remembers telling Lois to just smile and nod and keep it on the inside because  _ it makes things blow over quicker _ , remembers Lois setting her jaw and saying  _ you're too scared of them,  _ and the memory makes him want to yell all over again. But he promised himself a long time ago that he would never scream in front of Erin, so he doesn't. 

"Right," he hears himself say from very far away. His chair makes a terrible scraping noise as he stands up. "We'll be going," he says at the same time that Hawkeye says, "I think my jacket's in the front closet."

"Erin, get your sweater." The line of her shoulders relaxes. She nods and scampers off to the formal living room. BJ's mother rises too and follows them. His father stays at the table—BJ isn't sure whether to be grateful or even more angry than he already is. 

"You can't leave," says his mother. 

"Oh, but we are," he says with a tight little smile.

She crosses her arms. "And I suppose we'll see Erin in another ten years?"

"Or, you know. Never." Hawkeye touches his elbow lightly. 

"Beej," he says quietly. BJ looks at him. Hawkeye looks back. "Let's go," he says, and jerks his head towards the door. BJ nods and steps back towards Hawkeye, towards freedom. Erin returns, red sweater slung over her shoulder, and comes to stand between them.

They walk onto the front steps, first BJ, then Erin. Hawkeye pauses just before he walks out the door. He turns around to face BJ's mother with a big smile that doesn't reach his eyes. "Mrs. Hunnicutt, I'd say it's been a little slice of heaven. But it hasn't, so I won't." BJ has never been happier to hear him get the last word in. With that, Hawkeye pulls the door shut behind them and together they walk down and out to the car, leaving BJ's father and the kitchen table and the seething, oppressive silence of that house behind. 

They're quiet in the car. BJ puts a toothpick in his mouth and focuses on chewing it to splinters instead of punching the dashboard or cursing. 

Predictably, Hawkeye is one to break the silence. "A filthy Jewish pansy," he mulls as soon as they're on the highway. "I have to give your father credit there; I don't think anyone's ever called me both those things at the same time." 

"I wish I had punched him in the mouth."

"So do I," says Hawkeye. He reaches across the gearshift to take BJ's right hand, and squeezes it gently. BJ glances over at him. He looks a little amused, a little sad, but not like he's blaming himself for his technically-in-laws being jackasses. BJ squeezes Hawkeye's hand back. 

"I'm sorry," he says."I shouldn't have brought you." 

"Eh, at least we got a free salad out of it."

"I'm serious."

"So am I. Look, if you hadn't brought us, you would have had to do that alone."

BJ shakes his head. "You ever see this in your wildest dreams?" This is an old shorthand between them whenever things go disastrously wrong, a way for one to say  _ this isn't perfect  _ and the other to reply  _ it doesn't need to be.  _

Hawkeye gives him a look somewhere between incredulous, exasperated, and fond. "No. This sort of thing belongs on a soap opera, and I only pay the best writers to do the storylines for my subconscious." He squeezes BJ's hand again. "Besides. I knew what I was getting into. They're part of the package, like your habit of self-flagellating, and the days of the terrible mustache."

BJ snorts despite himself. "Just for that I'm taking my hand back and growing my mustache out, starting tomorrow." He sees Hawkeye smile a little when BJ conspicuously doesn't take his hand away. Little does he know that BJ was serious about the mustache. 

It's quiet again for a minute before Hawkeye mumbles, "God, I'm hungry."

BJ sighs, wistfully picturing the whole chicken they would have eaten if they'd stayed. "Me too."

"Almost makes me wish we'd stayed past sal—" He stops and sniffs the air. "Beej, did you get the car washed recently?"

"No, why?"

"It smells sweet in here."

"Oh, right," Erin says. "Sorry. I forgot I had them." 

He exchanges a look with Hawkeye, who looks just as confused as he is. "Had what?" BJ repeats.

"Remember those cookies on the blue table? In the room with the really hard sofa?"

"Yeah."

"Well, I left my sweater in that room, and when I went to find it, it was sitting right there in front of the cookies. And I figured since you were so mad and Grandm— well, those  _ people _ were so awful, you probably wouldn't be mad at me." She reaches into her sweater, still in a heap on the seat beside her, and pulls out two chocolate chip cookies. She passes the little red bundle forward. "Do you two want some?"

Hawkeye only gets as far as "What—" before he starts howling with laughter. BJ glances over at the bundle in Hawkeye's arms and nearly spits his toothpick out. The arms have been tied so that the sweater forms a little bag, and she's put what looks to be the entire plate of thirty-odd cookies inside. 

"Erin!" He tries to sound stern, but he's already starting to laugh.

"All I had was salad! That's just leaves, Dad!"

"Leaves are good for you!" he protests just as Hawkeye says, "Beej, I hate to say it, but these snickerdoodles are good. Here, eat one."

BJ takes one— they are indeed as good as he remembers from thirty years ago. "Once when I was a kid, I ran away from home, and these cookies were the only food I brought." 

"Really?" Erin asks through a mouthful of oatmeal raisin. 

"No, not really." He doesn't know why he said it. He never would have thought to leave; he'd always been the kind of person who tried to stick things out, even as a kid. "It was never that bad."

"Really?" says Hawkeye. 

A long pause. "Maybe. I guess it was."

Erin must interpret his sudden silence as anger, because he hears her shift nervously in the back seat. "Dad? Are you mad?" She meets his eyes in the rearview mirror.

"No. No, of course not. Not at you, anyway. If anything… If anything I'm proud." She smiles and looks out the window, chewing what must be her third or fourth cookie.

Hawkeye snickers to himself. "Hey. You think I could have got that chicken into my jacket without them noticing?" They all laugh hysterically, and BJ feels the last of his anger slip out the window. It's one of the last perfect days of autumn, and he's out of the woods. He's speeding home to his little blue house, riding in the sunlight with two of the people he loves most in the world, stuffing himself with snickerdoodles.

Erin clears her throat and brushes crumbs off her shirt. "You know, it's a long ride back, Hawk."

"I do know that."

"I mean, we probably have time for a story."

"Yeah? Call the station, I hear they're taking requests."

BJ suppresses a smile as he watches Erin pretend to dial a number in the rearview mirror. "Hello, Radio BFP? Long-time listener, first-time caller, I was wondering if you've got the story of how you met Dad for the second time? It's a special day for me and I'd really appreciate it."

Hawkeye clicks his tongue. "What? Again? You both know it by heart, why do I have to tell it?" BJ smiles. This is part of the routine: Hawkeye pretends to be annoyed at having to tell the same story again, but not-so-secretly loves being asked.

"It's better when you tell it," BJ says in an obvious appeal to Hawkeye's ego and competitive spirit (also part of the routine). Hawkeye gives him a look saying  _ I know what you're up to,  _ but he softens. 

"Alright. Where do I start?"

"The beginning. Duh." Erin settles back in her seat, pleased at her victory.

"Okay. Once upon a time, in a faraway land known as Maine, a man had a nightmare and had to call an ogre for help—"

Erin interrrupts, "Hawk, no. That's not the beginning."

"Who's telling the story?"

"You. But it's not— I mean, it starts before that. In the summer, after you came home."

"Says who? How do you know it doesn't start in April of '51? That's when I met your father. Or February of '53, when I got sent to the front in his place, or when he spent six weeks in Reno in '54, or that May when—"

Erin groans, "Okay, okay! Tell the story." just as BJ says, "Honey, you're fighting a losing battle."

Hawkeye smiles. "Thank you. So anyway, back to the dashing young knight and the ogre."

*******

"Dad, wake up. I need to go to Boston right now."

"Wh— Jesus, it's the middle of the night, what the hell is going on?"

"We were all on the El in Boston heading to the hospital but I got separated from everyone else and then we were moving parallel to another train, and I saw Margaret on the other one, and I tried to tell her there was something on her tracks—"

"Ben, slow do—"

"But she couldn't hear me so her train turned over and she  _ died _ and I woke up before I could get her, and I tried to call Boston just to make sure she was fine but the operator said she wasn't  _ listed _ and I—" His breath hitched. "I need to find her, Dad, I think she might really be dead."

" _ Ben _ ." His father pressed a steadying hand to his elbow. "Before you go tearing off into the night, is there anyone else you can think of who might know how to reach her?"

Hawkeye forced himself to breathe. "Charles might. He's in Boston."

"Okay. Go call him; maybe he knows." 

So Hawkeye ran back out into the hall and dialed. He was so busy trying not to hyperventilate that he didn't even register that this would be the first person from Korea he'd spoken to until an irate voice was hissing in his ear: "What is the meaning of this tomfoolery? If this is a crank call, I'll have the best lawyers on Beacon Hi—"

"Charles, where's Margaret?"

"Wh— Pierce?"

"Yes, yes, it's me, hallelujah and howdy-do, now can you  _ please _ tell me how to reach her? It's urgent—"

Charles made a noise like  _ pfah.  _ "Urgent! What on earth could possibly be so dire that you feel the need to—"

"I had a dream that she died on the El. In Boston. And I tried to call her, but it said she wasn't listed, so I called you. "

Silence. "Pierce— Hawkeye. It was a dream. Nothing more." He sounds tired and old. "Go back to sleep."

"That isn't how it works, you  _ know _ that."

Charles was an overbearing, arrogant, argumentative, condescending asshole on a good day. On a bad one, Merriam-Webster wouldn’t have enough disparaging adjectives to cover him. He had also spent nearly two years dealing with Hawkeye’s screaming nightmares, and therefore didn’t bother pointing out that it was both illogical and rude to wake Margaret up in the middle of the night. "…Did you try the operator?"

" _Yes,_ you pompous jackass, _yes_ of course I tried the operator but they said she wasn't _listed_ and it's very important so could you _please_ unstick your head from your rectum and TELL ME!"

Charles sighed and huffed out the number. "Will that be all?"

"Yeah, thanks a lot." 

He was about to hang up when he heard Charles mumble, "Where is that man when you need him?"

Hawkeye snatched the phone back up. "Where's who?" 

There was a suspiciously long pause before Charles said, "The Lord, Pierce. I'm praying for my sanity."

"Hello?"

"Margaret? Margaret, it's me."

"Hawkeye?"

"Oh, Jesus, it  _ is  _ you."

"Hawkeye, what’s going on? Don't you know it's the middle of the night?" He'd never been so happy to hear her mad in all his life.

"No, see, I had a dream that you died, and I tried to call Boston but they said you weren't listed in the phone book, and then I had to call  _ Charles  _ of all people— but listen, it doesn't matter, I just missed your dulcet tones. Why aren't you listed in the phone book anyway?"

"I just moved, I haven't had time to get the phone line registered. Hawkeye, what's going on?"

"I just told you. I had a dream."

"No, I mean— oh, Hawkeye. How are you?"

"Me? Fine, fine. Peachy. Dandy, even."

An extremely suspicious pause. "If you're going to lie to me, I'm going to hang up right now and go back to bed."

"Okay, so I'm only mostly fine. My body's okay, as rugged as ever. My brain's mostly okay too—"

"Operative word being mostly."

"Right. I keep having these terrible dreams. I mean, I try to control them, but… it doesn't always work. I've spoken to Sidney a couple of times, and that didn't do any good. A couple of times I even exercised, and that didn't work either. I've tried positive thinking, negative thinking, neutral thinking, acidic, basic; you name it, I've done it. Something's not right about what I'm doing, but I just can't figure out what it is."

"I know what you mean. They start nice and then by the end of it you're screaming yourself awake."

"Always the same few things, too. No originality in the plotlines."

She snorted. "You sound like Charles. He complained about that to me yesterday."

"Oh, yeah? You, uh, been spending a lot of time together? Talking about your dreams?"

"Don't be disgusting." Hawkeye never thought he'd miss her annoyance, but he found himself smiling as she huffed, "He told me that over lunch. Friends talk about things like that."

"Yeah." Hawkeye opened his mouth to apologize for waking her up, or to make a joke, but instead what came out was: "Hey, uh, you wanna go fishing sometime?"

"What? In January? Do you have worms in your brain?"

"No, but I do have little weasels in pinstripe suits."

"Hawkeye, I'm not fishing in the Charles River with you."

"Of course not. Imagine if we dragged up some distant cousin of Charles. The fishing's much better here in Maine. So's the company."

He could practically hear the face she was making: lips pressed, eyes narrowed, jaw set. "Is this your roundabout way of asking me to come visit you?"

"No, I just want to borrow a cup of sugar, but the entire state of Maine is out and I don't know who else to ask."

He heard her moving around, mumbling to herself, pages turning. "Okay," she said at last. "I can be there on Wednesday."

"Really?"

"You're not the only one it's been hard for. Now give me your address before I change my mind." Hawkeye gave her his address and directions with a kind of bemused delight, a little unsure that it was really happening but willing to play along. Instead of saying goodbye like a normal person, Margaret assured him that she would be there by mid-afternoon and threatened him with bodily harm should he ever call in the middle of the night again. She hung up when Hawkeye started laughing. 

He put the phone back on the hook and turned to find his father watching him from the doorway to his bedroom. "What number nightmare is this? This week?"

"The fourth, I think," Hawkeye answered.

"You didn't scream this time."

"No." They watched each other. "I don't think I'm going back to sleep."

"What will you do?"

"Look through recipe books. A visit from Margaret demands a feast."

"Don't make too much noise."

Hawkeye fell asleep on the kitchen floor, in the middle of reading a recipe for pecan pie. He dreamed he was at a party, sitting on the sidelines as people spun around the dance floor. He propped his elbows on the table and sipped champagne, feeling distantly happy. After a minute, he saw Margaret in a wedding dress, dancing with Charles.  _ They'll drive each other crazy, _ he thought, but as they moved past his table, he heard Charles say, "My dear woman, we'll take a tax loss, _ "  _ and Margaret tossed her head back in laughter. He looked around for more familiar faces— Kellye in Igor's arms, his cousin Katherine, Al the mailman— and was briefly disappointed when he didn't see BJ. 

Suddenly he realized that there was someone else, sitting with their shin pressed against his own underneath the table. Hawkeye couldn't turn his head, but he smelled BJ's citrusy cologne, and recognized BJ's slow, even breathing. He slowly leaned back and felt BJ's arm already there, casually draped across the back of his chair. Suddenly the distant happiness came nearer. It fizzed through his skin like champagne; all at once all his senses came alive. 

_ This is it,  _ he tried to tell BJ in excitement.  _ The real thing. You know the last time I felt this happy?  _ But all he could do was lean into the warmth of BJ's arm and press his leg impossibly closer into BJ's own, and hope he knew what he meant.

  
  


When Margaret arrived on Wednesday afternoon, it was snowing, but that didn't stop Hawkeye from running out to meet her in his shirtsleeves. They didn't say hello, because they had never really said goodbye. They just clung to each other in the snow like long-lost lovers, not saying a word. Before Margaret could say anything, Hawkeye used all of his meager reserves of upper-body strength to lift her off the ground and swing her around in a circle just to hear her shriek and laugh in surprise. 

"Hawkeye, you're going to drop me!" He laughed, kissed her cheek, and set her down without really letting go. He sized her up: hair a little shorter, smile a little less tired. 

"Margaret, you look great." He hugged her again, unable to stop himself. "You've gained some weight back!"

"So have you." She poked his ribcage and frowned. "Not enough, though."

_ Less than five minutes and she's already suspicious.  _ Hawkeye rolled his eyes to cover for his unease. "You sound like my father." She narrowed her eyes at him. Before he could make a crack about her expression, he felt cold fingers on his back, and yelped in surprise. 

"What the hell are you doing?! I don't do this for free!"

"I want to see if I can still feel your ribs. Stop squirming," she snapped. Hawkeye had almost forgotten that it was nearly impossible to lie to her convincingly.

"We only just reunited and you already want my clothes off? It's below zero out here!" He tried to twist away, but her hands were still under his shirt and she ended up moving forwards with him.

"Pierce, just lift your shirt up."

"Couldn't I just tell you how much I weigh?" 

"You'd probably make some smartass remark and dance around the issue. Stop fooling around or I'll put you in a headlock."

"Five bucks says you couldn't." And they were off, luggage abandoned and creaking joints forgotten, trying not to laugh as they threatened each other with bodily harm, chasing each other around the car like children. Margaret scooped up a handful of powdery snow from the ground and hurled it at him; Hawkeye retaliated by sweeping an armload off the car's hood and dumping it into her hair. When Hawkeye's father came home half an hour later, he found them lying side by side in the yard, staring at the sky. 

"Does the US Army approve of making snow angels?"

Margaret scrambled to her feet. "I, uh," she stammered. Hawkeye stayed on his back, enjoying the show. "Sorry about the snow. I mean, the mess. I mean— oh, goddamnit." She sighed and stuck out her hand. "Margaret Houlihan. It's good to finally meet you, Dr. Pierce. And I'm not a major anymore." 

His father grinned. "Even better. But call me Daniel, please, Dr. Pierce is my son."

"Hardee har har," Hawkeye mumbled as he got to his feet. "Don't listen to him, he thinks he's funny."

"Is that where you get it from?" Hawkeye made a face at her while his father whooped with laughter. 

"You know, Margaret, I think you're alright."

  
  


Margaret got along strangely well with his father, once he was done razzing her and making anti-army jokes. After a dinner filled with embarrassing stories from Hawkeye's childhood, Hawkeye showed her to her room. He sat on the bed while she unpacked, listening to her complain about how civilian hospitals were run. 

When she had emptied her suitcase and everything was put away in perfect order, she turned to him with her hands on her hips. "Now what?"

He shrugged elaborately. "I don't know."

"It's your house. You want to talk?"

"Sure. How do you get your pantyhose not to wrinkle when you stuff them in a suitcase? I could never do that."

She huffed. "That's because you're a slob. And that's not what I meant."

"Okay. Tell me about  _ your _ dreams." Margaret opened her mouth like she was about to say something, then thought better of it. 

"Fine." She looked around the room. "Do you have Scrabble?"

So Hawkeye found the beaten-up Scrabble board, a dictionary, and a bottle of wine for them to share. At first it was quiet, a little awkward. Like they were only just realizing what it meant for Hawkeye to have called her in the middle of the night, for Margaret to have dropped everything to see him, for neither of them to be talking about what they really meant to talk about. Once none of it would have been possible. But after a glass of wine each, they loosened up. By midnight, the game had devolved into wildly flinging tiles at each other from opposite ends of the coffee table, after Hawkeye had tried to make  _ verklempt _ and Margaret didn't believe it was a real word. 

"Christ, I'm tired," she finally said around one-thirty. 

They were both a little tipsy. "So go to sleep, and we won't talk about it in the morning." 

She lifted her head from the coffee table to look at him. "Then what will we do?" They were both tipsy, but Hawkeye suddenly felt the buzz of the wine drain from his body to be replaced by a gnawing, pacing anxiety. There was absolutely nothing less in the world he wanted than to Talk About It. He stared at her for a minute, trying desperately to think of something that would placate her, and to forget that Margaret could never be dissuaded for long. "We'll go sledding," he said. 

"Hawkeye, I'm thirty-four. I'm too old to sled."

"Says who?"

"Says common sense and the pain in my back from years of army cots."

"The hell with them. You and me. It's a date."

For the next three days, everything was close to perfect. They ran around in the snow until they were tired, then came inside and napped in front of the fire. Margaret told him stories about adjusting to civilian life and kindly didn't ask questions when Hawkeye didn't reciprocate. Hawkeye entertained himself by making elaborate meals and trying to get Margaret to plan the menu. At first she made him decide what to cook— he guessed that after a lifetime in the army, she still wasn't used to making little choices like what to eat. But by Friday afternoon, she stood at his side, micromanaging him as he chopped onions for spaghetti bolognese. He told himself that the menu-planning was for Margaret's sake— she needed to learn how to make small decisions like a regular person, not be bossed around by some army freaks— but really it was just nice to feel needed again.

At least once per day, Margaret tried to broach the dreams, or the war. Each time, Hawkeye redirected her into fixing the leaky sink, or arguing about the real lyrics to "Begin the Beguine," or making a silent competition out of finishing a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle of autumn leaves at opposite ends of the coffee table in the living room. 

But by Saturday night, when the snow started to ice over and the mail hadn't come in three days, Margaret had gotten tired of waiting. They cleared the dishes from dinner in silence; Hawkeye's father was making a house call. When the last plate had been dried, Margaret said, "Let's sit outside. I'll get the blankets if you go get something to drink."

"But—"

"Go. I know where everything is." Hawkeye tried to ignore the twisting feeling in his gut as he rummaged around in the liquor cabinet and reminded himself that he was a master of deflection. By the time he went out to the porch swing, Margaret was already curled up and staring out at the stars. She raised an eyebrow at the bottle in his hand. “Only wine?” 

“Yeah, I’m trying—” He’d meant to make a joke, but for some reason he looked at her wrapped in the blue quilt that had once been his mother’s and found that it wasn’t coming, so he said: “Trying to cut back. You know.” 

Once she would have pressed him for details of his drinking, which would have led to Hawkeye being snippy and defensive and Margaret getting angry and self-righteous, which would have led to a screaming fight in which they would have said a few true things that they didn’t regret and maybe a few that they did, and probably at least one of them storming off in a huff, which would have taken at least four and a half drinks to cool down from. (He’d done the math once in Korea.) But today she just nodded and looked back out at the trees as he curled up in his own blanket next to her.

“Hawkeye?”

She had been merciful in not asking him until now, but there was no way he could avoid the conversation any longer. "Yeah."

"Why did you ask me to come?"

"I had a bad dream. The army thought we were a North Korean camp and started shelling us. You died. That's all. I just— I got scared, you know? I had to make sure you were all right."

"That's it?" 

"That's it. There's really nothing else to report, you know. I'm a simple country doctor who works a couple of days a week at his dad's clinic. I don't have an interesting life in a major American city. I mean, Jesus, I feel like all I've done since I got back was sleep."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean I go to bed at eight, and I wake up at six. I have dreams that are so vivid, I have trouble distinguishing them from reality. Once I dreamed that I woke up in the middle of the night, and my mother was sitting at the foot of the bed and mending my socks in the dark. She looked so real, sitting there…" He trailed off, a little embarrassed to be carrying on about his dreams. But Margaret only nodded.

"Were you scared?"

"No. I just watched her. After a while she rose and put the socks in my dresser, and smiled at me, and walked out the door. It shut behind her with a thud. Then I went back to sleep. In the morning, I went downstairs and told my father I'd seen a ghost. It wasn't until he said he hadn't heard anything that I realized it was a dream. Another time I dreamed that Tommy Gillis climbed through my bedroom window and we played cards. When I woke up, I was confused as to how I got into my bed, because I remembered falling asleep on the rug next to him so clearly."

"Tommy," she said suddenly. "I remember him."

"Really?"

"I'd never seen you so upset before. I couldn't stop thinking about it— at first I thought it was just pity for you, because you'd lost your friend. After a few weeks, I figured out that really I was frightened."

"For you or for me?" Her hair looked white in the moonlight. 

Margaret didn't look at him when she said, "Both." 

He could feel a rock starting to form in his throat. "I hated that, you know? That I was a barometer. A— a signpost." He took a huge swallow of wine to try and wash the rock back down to wherever it came from. "That everyone looked to me to see how they should be doing. I didn't ask for that."

"We shouldn't have done it," she said quietly into her own glass.

"But you did!" He heard his own pulse in his ears and realized he was yelling. He forced himself to take a breath and remind himself that Margaret didn't like loud noises before he repeated,"But you did."

At last she faced him. She looked achingly sad, but her voice was level when she said, "I know. But I can only say sorry for myself." Hawkeye kept himself from saying  _ that's not enough.  _ It was too early in the night to get really angry. So instead he nodded, hoping she would know that he was only accepting some of her apology, and looked back out at the snow.

He picked up where he'd left off, because that was what he and Margaret did. They fought and yelled and drove each other crazy, and stopped being angry as soon as something big happened. "And it's not just the dreams that I mistake for reality, either. It's the other way around; sometimes I can't tell if this, everything around us, is just a brief respite…"

"And we're all going to open our eyes and be back there," she finished. He looked at her, caught off guard. She smiled wryly and shrugged. "I've had the same thought myself. Is that so unbelievable?"

"No. It's just that…"  _ It's only that for a long time, you didn't seem to mind.  _

She seemed to know exactly what he was thinking. "You're not the only one who came out changed, Hawkeye Pierce," she said sharply. "I know you took the worst of it, I won't argue with that, and I won't pretend that I was right to do and say the things I did in the beginning. But I'm not the person I was when I came to Korea, either."

“No. You’re not.” He remembered something she’d said over the phone that he’d been too panicked to address. “Hey. You said that I wasn’t the only person who had it rough. I never believed that, you know--”

“That’s not what I meant. I was talking about the dreams.”

“You have them too? About the war?”

“What else?” she snorted. "I have three. The same three, over and over. One about my wedding dress being covered in blood. One about my father— well, really it's a few dreams, but they always end the same way, so I count them as the same one. Sometimes he dies, but that’s… well, I know how to deal with those dreams. I’ve had them with everyone I care about." To someone who didn't know her, she probably would have sounded matter-of-fact. To Hawkeye, she sounded like she was about to cry. "It's worse when it's a memory." She was very far away from him now, somewhere that didn't exist. "Like the time he came to visit us. That whole miserable week of shame and inadequacy…" 

"Was it so bad?"

"Maybe not to you." She finished the rest of her wine in one swallow and held it out for more. 

"What's the third one?"

"Does it matter?" 

"It does to you."

"Do you remember my friend Helen Whitfield?"

"Yeah."

"I keep having this dream that she's won the shooting competition at Fort Benning— that's where we met, after we finished nursing school. And everyone's yelling and hollering, but she's only looking for me in the crowd, and when she finds me, she stretches her arm out. So I run forward and take her arm by the elbow, like I'm— her wife or something. I don't know." The words came out quickly, like she was hoping Hawkeye wouldn't notice what she'd said. "Anyway, we're standing together on the platform, everyone's cheering, and then someone else gets out of the crowd and shoots me. Just like that. I never see it coming. Everyone starts screaming, and I'm lying on the ground in Helen's arms. But I'm happy."

"Then what?"

"Then I die. I'm happy and calm as can be."

"Jesus. Maybe you're the one who should be talking to Sidney every week."

"Why? I know what it means."

"…You want to die in her arms?"

"There are worse ways to go. And anyway, I know that even when I'm awake." She said this calmly, as though she'd come to terms with it a long time ago, but her hand shook a little as she sipped her wine. Hawkeye's head spun with questions:  _ Are you saying what I think you're saying? Are you like me? How come you didn't tell me? Have you always known you were different? Is that why your marriage didn't work out? How long have you been in love with someone who didn't know you loved them? Does it hurt for you as much as it does for me?  _

He cleared his throat. "Personally, I think that a quiet end in one's own bed is a very underrated death, but I see the appeal of dying for love. Have you, uh, always known that's how you wanted to go out?"

"No, not always. I had… a feeling— a few times— that that was what I wanted. But I didn't know it was her until just before she left m—" She stopped before she could say what Hawkeye suspected was  _ me.  _ "Left for home."

"Huh." They were both quiet for all of three seconds before Hawkeye couldn't help himself. "I didn't know that you liked women," he blurted. 

She shrugged and smiled a little. "That's the way I wanted it." Hawkeye nodded in his best imitation of Father Mulcahy, mentally re-evaluating every interaction he could remember between Margaret and another woman. Mostly they were of Margaret yelling at the other nurses for being unmilitary, which made him feel better about not having realized she liked women earlier. He preferred hiding in plain sight, cracking jokes about getting pregnant and meeting handsome men behind a veneer of plausible deniability, to marrying and divorcing a jerk from West Point. He was gearing up to a joke about perpetual bachelorettehood when she spoke again. 

“Are you surprised?”

“A little. I’m more surprised that you told me at all.”

“Yeah, well. You’re probably the only person I  _ could _ tell.” He grins, but she cuts him off before he can say anything. “Don’t let that go to your head. If it gets any bigger, you won’t be able to fit through the front door. I’m just saying that… it’s nice, you know. To have someone to talk to.” She sounded like she was choosing her words carefully when she said, “Don’t you have anyone to talk to?” Hawkeye knew she was really asking:  _ where the fuck is BJ? _

"Do you?" he shot back, which was easier than explaining. 

"Yes. I talk to Charles." She saw Hawkeye raising his eyebrows and added, "Don't scoff."

"I can't help it."

"Yes, you can. I know, I never thought I'd say it either. But it's been good to be near someone who understands, at least a little. What we did over there. What happened around us."

"And to us."

"Right." She pulled the blanket closer around her. "Of course, he's the same as always. There are things he can't understand because, well…"

"Charles is Charles."

"Basically. He always tried to insulate himself from the worst of it." She looked at him. The words went unspoken:  _ not like you. " _ But he knows enough to be a comfort."

"So if you have him, why schlep all the way out here to freeze your ass off with me?" 

It came out more bitter than intended, but Margaret just shook her head and said, "Because you sounded like you needed someone to listen."

"That's it?"

She raised one eyebrow. "Would you have done the same for me?"

He didn't even have to think about his response. "Well, of course. Of course I would have."

"Then there you go." She looked like she was about to say something else, but then the Pierces' battered green Ford rolled into the driveway and his father hopped out. He crunched his way up the driveway, but stopped when he saw Hawkeye and Margaret, still huddled together under the blanket. "Well, well. Lovebirds making their own heat, I see." He chuckled to himself as he clomped up the stairs.

Margaret made a sound somewhere between indignation and embarrassment as Hawkeye sighed, "Dad. It’s nothing like that." 

He laughed, "Yeah, yeah. Your heart belongs to California Boy, I know," and sauntered in, blissfully unaware of the chaos he'd just created. 

Margaret whipped around to stare at Hawkeye. "California Boy?"

"He's going senile, don't pay any attention to him." Hawkeye looked around and contemplated running. With his luck, he'd probably slip on black ice and bust his tailbone. Okay, no running— if he got in the car and left right away, he could make the late flight to Tahiti. He could probably reinvent himself there, on a little island, surrounded by beautiful people and good weather. No father to divulge his deepest secret to someone who will make fun of him for it as long as they both live.

“Hawkeye?”

“What.” 

“You love him, don’t you.”

“Who, MacArthur? We had one steamy night in Tokyo, but that's hardly the basis for a marria—"

"Wrong coast. You know who I'm talking about."

"I know you do, but what do I know?"

She narrowed her eyes at him. Hawkeye got the sense that if she were standing up, she'd be stamping her foot. "BJ. You love him."

"BJ? Well, yeah, sure, I love the guy, but I’m not madly in love with him or anything. It’s not like I fantasize about raising a family inside a white picket fence and long walks by the Pacific Ocean and Sunday breakfasts and stuff like that." It was a long moment before Hawkeye was brave enough to look over at her: when he did, he found a little smile, a real one, tugging up at the corner of her mouth. 

“What? What’s the matter with you?”

“I knew it. Charles owes me twenty bucks.” 

“What?” 

“He said there was no way that he, Charles Emerson Winchester the Third, possessing superior deduction powers and finely-honed instincts for this sort of thing, could have lived with you both for nearly two years and never have picked up on the fact that you two were in love. He said he would have noticed something like that. I bet him twenty dollars that he was full of baloney. And now he’s going to pay up.”

“Margaret, I said specifically that I was  _ not _ in lo—”

“You’re a lousy liar.”

“Wh— Am not!”

“You are so, Benjamin Franklin Pierce, at least to the people who know you.” He opened his mouth to reply but she gave him a quelling look, what BJ had once referred to as visual arsenic— and suddenly there was BJ grabbing him by the elbow and saying _quickquickquick she's on the warpath_ and sprinting out of post-op breathless and laughing and exactly in sync before she could kill them for messing with her hair dye, and something twinged in his chest— so he shut up. So maybe it hadn't been his best-kept secret. In his defense, that kind of love was hard to hide. 

“I’m right. Argue all you want.” 

“Okay, so what. Big deal. Everyone is.”

“That’s not true. Some of us like women.”

“You’re still not getting twenty dollars from Charles.”

“Why not?”

“Unless I’ve misunderstood, your bet was that he loved me too. And that’s just not…” He trailed off. Swallowed hard like it was going to do something about the lump in his throat. “It’s just not going to happen.” 

“How do you know?”

“Peg.” He didn’t need to say more. 

“Don’t be so sure.”

He sat bolt upright. “What’s that supposed to mean? Do you have inside knowledge? Have you been talking to BJ recently? Why the hell would he be talking to you and not me, I mean I’m his best friend—”

She held up her arms, looking more exasperated than alarmed at his sudden change in mood. “Will you relax? I didn’t mean anything by it. Just the way he looks at you sometimes… Well, I don’t know.”

Hawkeye relaxed back into his side of the swing. “Yeah?” What he really meant was  _ more _ , but that was too honest; it would have been like showing her a bruise and asking her to punch it. Somehow she understood this without him having to say it. 

“The way you used to sit so close together, even when the heat felt like it was crawling into your skin. How he looked after you and covered your stupid ass even when he didn’t know what you were up to-- like when he stole that damn Jeep to keep you from getting into trouble.” They smiled. “I still can’t believe he did that.”

“You know what he said when I asked him about it? He said, ‘I couldn’t let you be stupid for both of us.’”

She smacked the cushion between them, and Hawkeye jumped. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about! Who the hell talks like that to somebody they don’t love?”

He sighed. “Margaret, there’s a big difference between love and  _ in _ love.”

“Don’t deflect, Pierce. I’m not done momo— monololo— speaking to you.”

“Monologuing?”

“Shut up. And, and that time he thought you were dead at Battalion Aid and nearly drove himself crazy. And the other time when he wouldn’t go to sleep until you came back, and when you moved out of the Swamp and he sulked so much that Igor threw him out of the Officer’s Club, and, and how you used to talk without speaking! That really drove me crazy, you know, especially when I could tell that you were talking about me. And—” 

Hawkeye felt a little nauseous, as though he’d looked at his own wound and found bone sticking out. “Margaret, can we not talk about this anymore?”

"No! This is the whole goddamn problem!”

"Look, even if he did… feel that way about me. It wouldn't be enough."

"Why not?"

"Because, because love is not a— a panacea. It doesn't make everything magically easier. You're happier, but you're still carrying the same baggage through the airport of life, only now you're also in a three-legged sack race with another guy with his own suitcases, and he's carrying bricks in his. You're on the same flight, though."

She groaned and thunked her head on his shoulder. "I hate it when you do these complicated metaphors. Can't you just say what you mean?"

"No. The metaphors are— they're art, okay? I have to finish." He paused. His head was starting to get fuzzy with alcohol. "I don't remember what I was saying." She started to laugh in the half-snorting way she almost never did, letting out little whoops and covering her eyes with her hand. 

Hawkeye tried very hard to be angry with her for interrupting his important point, but he'd been trying to get her to laugh like that since he'd heard it for the first time nearly four years ago, so the best he could manage was a slightly annoyed, "Will you cut that out?"

"Hawkeye, Hawkeye— oh, I'm sorry, I can't help it. But you're really funny."

He threw his hands up in the air. "Three years of telling me I'm the least funny guy in the world, and as soon as I try to get serious—  _ now _ she tells me."

She wiped at her eyes and sighed. "By funny, I mean stupid."

"I don't follow."

"Hawkeye, you have no idea what he thinks about you. None at all. Because you—" she pokes him hard in the chest. "—have never asked him. You have never even tried to find out where he's heading in the airport of life, or whatever it is. For all you know, you could be heading to the same terminal. Maybe even the same flight! But you're just too chicken to find out." 

If Hawkeye hadn't been afraid, if he had been stupid and brave, maybe he would have joined the war as a regular soldier. Maybe he would have tried to be a hero, and fought for the late but not great United States. Maybe he would have died and been sent home in a box before he could lose his marbles. But he had been terrified, and he had tried to save everyone he could anyway, and he had come home alive but missing a few of his cookies. He wondered if it was really such a bad thing to be a chicken. He tried to verbalize this, but the wine was making its way to his brain, so all that came out was, "Ba-kawk."

"Stop that. Don't you want to know?"

"Of course I do. I want to know so badly, it's eating a hole in my liver and my head and my heart. I've been trying to find him in my dreams for six months; of course I want to know! But I can't ask that of him. Even if he did love me, even if he wanted me— in case you forgot, he's got a wife and kid who he's never going to abandon, especially not for a Grade-A certified fruitcake like me! He already said goodbye to me. Once was enough." The words were overflowing, dimly he registered that he really was spilling his heart out. "And I miss him. I miss him." He felt something leave him then, some wall inside his chest collapsing, some small part of him falling to its knees and crying in relief at being acknowledged. 

"It's stronger than anything I've ever felt before in my life. And yet I'd give anything for us to have never met at all. What am I supposed to do with that?" He looked over at Margaret, who was watching him, calmly, like she saw his inner workings and had nothing to be afraid of. 

"But you did meet. You can't change that," she said very seriously. 

"I wish I could forget it." He was lying and they both knew it. 

She raised one eyebrow. "Do you?"

"No." They were quiet again for a minute. "You know, sometimes I see him exactly in the last position I saw him in. With his back half-turned. Waving. And when I wake up I can't remember… I can't remember if he was real or not. Sometimes I hope he wasn't because it hurts so much to think about. Then I remember he was, and it all happened. And I keep telling myself I’m not supposed to look back, that I’m not going to do it anymore. But I can’t stop. I don’t know why.” 

She rested her head on his shoulder, and for a long time neither of them said anything. Hawkeye was beginning to drift off when he heard her whisper, "Sometimes I wish I could forget it all too." He rested his cheek on her head, and trusted her to know what he meant. 

At some point, they both fell asleep. Hawkeye woke up when he heard a voice saying  _ Helen, Helen—  _ Margaret was already sitting up, rubbing at her temples. She looked as exhausted as she had in Korea. "I guess we fell asleep."

"Guess we did," he whispered. Together, they rose and silently folded the quilts. They moved inside and up the stairs without speaking, arms brushing. Margaret hesitated at the door to her room. Hawkeye held his own door open.

"Wanna come in?"

"You're not her." She stepped closer.

"Obviously not."

"And I'm not him."

"I know. But sometimes it's easier to get back to sleep after a nightmare when you have company."

She searched his face for any traces of lechery, and must have been satisfied. "Alright. But no funny business." She marched past him and crawled into bed. 

"Good thing you don't think I'm funny," said Hawkeye as he curled up behind her, nose pressed into her shoulder. 

He fell asleep and didn't dream. 

When he came downstairs in the morning, feeling better-rested than he had since 1950, Margaret had already made coffee and toast. She smiled when he came to stand next to her at the counter. They stood for a few minutes in silence, squinting out the window at the snow and crunching their toast. 

At last, Hawkeye announced, "This feels very domestic. You know, maybe in another universe, we got married."

Margaret smiled and wrinkled her nose. "Can you imagine?"

"We'd be a lousy husband and wife."

"Yeah. Lousy for each other, at least." She paused. Sipped her coffee. Deliberately didn't look at Hawkeye when she said, "I think I could be a good wife for Helen. And you would be a good husband for BJ."

Hawkeye's stomach turned. "We're not still talking about this."

But Margaret never let him get away with it, even when it would have been easier for both of them. "What did you mean when you said you saw BJ in your dreams?"

"I— I dream about him. Or try to, at least."

"Try to?"

"Yeah, you know, I… I'll just show you." He went upstairs and retrieved the prescription pad full of dreams. To her credit, Margaret didn't immediately ask if there was something wrong with him. He congratulated his past self for having the foresight not to write down any sex dreams as she carefully read each page of the dream journal— not that it mattered when she had access to his deepest fears and desires. 

At last she set the stack of paper onto the counter and looked at him. "Why are you doing this?" 

"Because I'm experimenting with how to find BJ in my dreams, and this is my lab notebook." She looked like she was going to ask if he had a fever, so he cut her off before she could say anything. "Okayokayokay, not just that, it's that… I thought maybe if I wrote the dreams down, I could make them stop rattling around my head all the time like a goddamn pinball machine. And I can't… forget what I feel for him, I knew that would be impossible even before we left—"

She put her head into her hands and took a deep breath. "No, I mean— Hawkeye, why don't you just talk to him?"

"This is easier."

Margaret stared at him. "That's one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard you say. You're just going to, what, think about him real hard and hope you see him again? Never write or call?" She stomped over to the stove and poured another mug of coffee. 

"Margaret, I can't do that. We already said goodbye. He has his life now and I have mine. It's just better this way."

"For who? You? Don't make me laugh." She plonked the mug down in front of Hawkeye. "You just showed me nearly six months worth of lovelorn  _ moping  _ on a prescription pad, and you expect me to believe that this is really good for you? Just call him!"

"I can't. I'd get so nervous that I'd probably lose my lunch into the receiver."

"So write a letter."

"I can't do that either!" He hopped up and paced the kitchen. "I wouldn't know what to say. We're not— not that kind of people, you know? We're talkers, not writers."

Margaret sighed. "Okay." She got up, mumbling something about  _ men _ . Hawkeye watched her in confused silence as she ripped a page off the newspaper and fished out a pen from the jar on the counter. "Now you talk."

"What?"

"You talk. Say what you want to say. I'll write it down."

"Since when do you know shorthand?"

"Since never," she said. "Let's see, today's the twenty-fourth…" He stared at the top of her head, bent over as she carefully dated the paper, and felt impossibly fond of her. 

“Margaret?”

“Yeah," she said without looking up.

“I think you’re my best friend after BJ.”

She lifted her head and grinned. “Me too.”

A noise from the hallway— his father clomped into the kitchen in full snow gear. "Ben, I'm heading out. I got three house calls to make; that shithead Nick Cromwell fell off his ladder and sprained his neck. Don't wait for lunch. Margaret, in case I don't see you when I get back—" He crossed the kitchen and gave her a hug. Margaret shot Hawkeye a panicked look. Hawkeye grinned back at her and gave her a thumbs-up. 

"I'd make a joke about wishing Ben could have married you instead, but I think you'd drive each other crazy. You're welcome any time." He clapped her on the shoulder. 

"Thank you. I think," Margaret said, still looking baffled but pleased to be accepted.

"It's a compliment!" he called over his shoulder. "Hey, Ben, before I forget— the mail finally came." He pointed at a small mountain of damp paper on the counter. "You got a letter from a lady in Nevada." 

"Nevada?" Hawkeye and Margaret said together. But he had already shut the door with a bang. 

She turned to look at him, already frowning. "Who the hell do you know in Nevada?"

"Uh… That nurse from the 8063rd, Angela Serra… maybe her?"

Margaret shook her head decisively. "No, she was from Salt Lake City, Utah. Let's check."

"How do you know that?" he asked as they began to sift through the mail.

"I went out with her a few times before she got transferred back to the States. She was…" She trailed off. Hawkeye fought valiantly against his grin and lost. "Well. She was something." She glanced up at him and scowled. "Wipe that stupid smirk off your face."

"Sir, yes, sir." They sorted for approximately three seconds in silence before Hawkeye couldn't resist it any longer and blurted out, "So how far did you get with her?"

"A lady doesn't kiss and tell. Unlike  _ some  _ peop— oh, here we go. Nevada. Says it's from…" She trailed off.

"Who?"

"Peg Hayden." 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hawkeye’s line about “little weasels” is a reference to The Neddiad by Daniel Pinkwater.  
> Not to shamelessly self-promote, but if you want more of my thoughts on Margaret exploring her sexuality, this fic is technically compatible with [one at a time](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27977619/chapters/68524902).
> 
> Thanks once again to [finesunnyday](https://archiveofourown.org/users/finesunnyday/pseuds/finesunnyday) for beta reading, and to anyone who left comments or kudos on the last chapter! I love you all. Next update should be up in about 2 weeks.


	3. 1964

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> July-August 1954.

It's so early that the light creeping in is gray, but Hawkeye is awake, lying in bed, watching him. BJ looks around: they're in Maine, under one of the heavy quilts the Pierces bring out in winter. He glances down and sees Hawkeye's index finger is hooked into the hem of his t-shirt. As soon as BJ notices, Hawkeye jerks his hand back, like he's been burned. 

_Hi_ , BJ whispers. At first Hawkeye doesn't say anything, just keeps watching him. His hair hasn't gone completely gray yet. He looks tired, thin, a little pale. BJ tries to ask him if they’ve been here before, done this before. Nothing comes out. 

_Kiss me_ , Hawkeye murmurs at last. BJ does. When he pulls back, he finds Hawkeye still watching him, almost as though he'd never shut his eyes. On impulse, he leans in again, but keeps his eyes open. He finds himself looking cross-eyed at Hawkeye.

_Why were your eyes open?_

_Why were yours?_ It's too early in the morning to evade, or he's tired, or maybe for once he just doesn't want to. The sky is starting to lighten at the edges. 

_I had to make sure,_ Hawkeye says. _That it wasn't a dream._

BJ wakes with a start and finds himself at the kitchen table. He looks around for Hawkeye, but instead finds a mostly empty bottle of bourbon and a silent house. The clock reads 6:42. The sun is already up and streaming through the windows. He looks out at the driveway: Hawkeye's car is gone.

All at once, the haze of sleep dissipates. _He really did drive himself to the airport. It wasn’t a dream._

There's a clink behind him: the cats delicately step around the shards of a plate on the floor, angrily thrashing their tails. He glances at the clock— it's past their breakfast time. He hauls himself up and goes to get them a can of tuna, wincing when his back cracks. He’s really too old to be doing this. 

Marlene gives him a baleful look, as though to say _he would never do this to us._ Noel opts to give BJ the cold shoulder and brushes past him to the bowl without even a tail-flick of acknowledgement. BJ maturely makes a face at them as he sweeps the floor clean. 

His head is pounding and the ache in his back is getting worse, so he goes into the living room and pointedly does not think about the way that Hawkeye left last night. When he lies down on the sofa, there's a strange lump under the cushions. He pulls it out: a ball of orange yarn. 

_(I did the math. It's more cost-effective to make the biscuits at home,_ Hawkeye informed him.

 _You can spend ten dollars on wool for a dog sweater, but you draw the line at five for a box of dog biscuits?_ BJ replied from where he was lounging on the sofa with a journal on his lap. Hawkeye threw a ball of wool at his head and shot back, _Says the guy who worries about the dog getting frostbite.)_

The memory makes something in his chest clench painfully. But his head feels like he got pounded by a Marine, and the light is too bright; the atmosphere is terrible for moping. He goes back into the kitchen and makes himself coffee. He switches on the radio, feeling like he's moving through water. 

_"—oday is July 16, 1964, and it's a beautiful Saturday morning here in San Francisco, currently 58 degrees and foggy, but temperatures are expected to rise to the mid-seventies by noon. Over in Daly City, the Republican Party is expected to announce their nomination, although senator Barry Goldwa—"_ But the news isn't the same without Hawkeye around to snipe at the hosts, so BJ fiddles with the dial until he hears music _—_ Etta James. 

" _Don't know why there's no sun up in the sky, stormy weather… Since my man and I ain't together… Keeps raining all of the time…_ " 

(Another memory: BJ dragged Hawkeye closer by his belt loops; Hawkeye yelped and dropped the plate he'd been washing in the sink, splashing dishwater on his freshly ironed shirt. "Beej, Peg's going to kill us if we look like degenerates!" BJ grinned and spun him around, singing along to the radio. 

"It's Etta James, I have to sing! _All I want to do is wash your clothes! I don't want to keep you indoors! There is nothing for—"_ he leaned in and kissed the side of Hawkeye's neck. " _—you to do—"_ Hawkeye laughed and pushed BJ's face away. "— _but keep me making lo-ove to you!"_ They were both laughing as BJ went in for another kiss. Then Erin had come in and screamed that if they made her late to her first-ever parent-teacher conference of middle school because they were busy being _disgusting,_ she was going to run away to Los Angeles. 

Hawkeye had only smiled. "There's no such place.")

Etta keeps singing: " _When he went away, the blues walked in and met me… oh, if he stays awa—_ " BJ turns the radio off and opts to feel bad for himself in silence. 

The quiet feels oppressive; it’s strange to be up this early, doing his morning ritual without Hawkeye making breakfast, Hawkeye reading the highlights from the paper, Hawkeye lightly touching the small of BJ’s back to let him know he’s passing behind him. Outside, someone starts their lawnmower; the milk truck rattles down the road. BJ tries to remember the last time he was up this early, having coffee by himself, and realizes it’s probably not since Hawkeye came to California (not counting the times Hawkeye’s had to stay overnight at the hospital while taking call, or when one of them’s had an early case). Not since BJ was still with Peg. 

He suddenly feels trapped, like he’s stepped through a hole in space and time and landed in the most miserable six months of his life. As though the last ten years of his life have been just a pleasant dream. The thought scares him so badly that before he can talk himself out of it, he runs to the phone and dials the Pierces’ number, marital spat be damned. But as soon as he says his name, Daniel politely but firmly tells him that Hawkeye is in the shower, and that he does not want to speak to BJ. 

"Even if I'm calling to apologize?"

"He said, and I quote: 'Especially if that rat Hunnicutt is calling to apologize. Let him stew.' End quote." So BJ sighs and says he understands, and goes back to moodily sipping his coffee by himself for all of eight minutes before he heads to the phone again. 

"Whitfield-Houlihan residence, Whitfield speaking." 

"Hi, Helen. It's BJ. Is Margaret around?" 

He must sound pretty pathetic, because Helen doesn't waste time with small talk. "Yeah, hang on, she's in the bathroom." Muffled voices: _Hey, BJ's on the line for you! I'm coming, give me a minute._ Laughter. _Honey, it's not like he can see you have curlers in._ Footsteps, whispers, the rustle of clothing. 

"BJ! Hi!" Margaret sounds a little breathless.

"Hey, Margaret. How's it going?"

"Oh, it's a little chaotic here; Charles and Nathan are visiting and you know how _that_ goes." He does know, and makes sympathetic noises to that effect. "Bless their hearts, as Helen says. But what's happening with you?"

"Actually, I was calling for advice."

He pictures her raising one eyebrow. "Go on."

"You know how Hawkeye had to go to Maine for a while, to help his dad with the house repairs?"

"Yeah, he told me about it last week over the phone. Said a tree fell through the bathroom and you couldn't come because you had to take call for three weeks."

"Right. Well, we had a big fight yesterday before he left for the airport."

"How big?" He runs through some possible responses in his head: _About six feet and two inches. The size of a small shack. A four on the Richter scale, maybe even a five. He drove himself to the airport._

"Well, he was finishing his packing and we were talking about all the things he had to do when he got there, and I made some throwaway comment about how middle-aged people say that fighting before you part makes the reunion better, and he just— completely flipped out, he started talking about _getting into ruts_ and _midlife crises,_ which doesn’t even make sense, and then he started yelling at me about how I'm a clueless jerk who has no idea about… well. You know how it is arguing with him. Before we knew it, we were arguing about nine or ten totally different things, and I got mad and he got even madder… And then he left for the airport."

She's silent for a minute. "Hunnicutt, are you stupid or something?"

"What do you mean, or something?"

"BJ, that was a moronic thing to say. Even I know how stressed he is about this trip, and I only talk to him once every couple of weeks. You _live_ with him!"

"He's not exactly easy to live with when he's stressed."

"I know that. He was under constant pressure for the first three years I knew him, remember? Believe me, nobody else knows better than I do that he can be insufferable, rude, self-righteous, stubborn, lecherous— well, I guess he isn't lecherous to you. Although everything else is still true."

"You said it, sister."

"But you of all people ought to know that talking about ruts and— and dissatisfaction was the most boneheaded move you could possibly have made right now!"

"Dissatisfaction? Margaret, that's got nothing to do with it— he was upset with me over the fact that I have no idea what he's going through with the house repairs! Of course I fucking don't; my father isn't a bachelor in Maine, and he's never had a Norway maple fall into his bathroom, and I've never had to pack up and leave for three weeks!"

"You dolt, of course you have no idea. This isn't about the repairs, it's…" She stops and starts again abruptly. "Look, you've got no connection to your parents, let alone the house you grew up in. I understand that; I don't either. But Hawkeye does."

"I know, but— What's that clicking noise?"

"Sorry, that's the curlers. Wait one—" In the background, he hears Helen say _hang on, I'll help, you keep talking._ Margaret whispers, _Thanks_. The thing in his chest from earlier contracts painfully again.

Before he can dwell on it, Margaret picks up right where she'd left off. "BJ, nobody wants to see their childhood home half-crushed by a tree. And you know Daniel wouldn't have called him if he didn't really need the help in fixing the house and getting things done— which is just one more thing for Hawkeye to work himself into fits about. It's just… brought up some things he'd rather not think about, is all." She sighs. "We're all getting older. Things are changing, you know?"

"Yeah."

"And I don't just mean that Hawkeye's being paranoid about Daniel falling off a ladder, or finding a mass on his kidney and dying—"

"Wait, you think he's worried about me… what, getting bored in my middle age and leaving him?" Which is frankly the stupidest thing he’s ever heard, because if anyone's afraid of getting left behind it's BJ. 

"How should I know? I'm just making an educated guess. All I'm saying is that Daniel's getting old, and the house is a mess, and you two are going to be apart for a while before you can join him."

"It's the longest he's been away since… since he came to California, and that was ten years ago," BJ says slowly. 

He can practically hear Margaret rolling her eyes when she sighs, "Now can you see why it was a bad idea to bring up getting bored with each other?"

"I never said anything about being bo—"

"BJ, do you see it or not?"

"Well. Well, yeah, but—"

"Good. Now, Charles is trying to reorganize my fridge, so I don't have any more time to hang around and listen to you feeling sorry for yourself. If you made a mistake, it's him you need to apologize to. So make yourself some coffee, talk to Hawkeye, and quit moping."

"Okay. Thanks, Margaret."

"Good luck!" says another voice that sounds suspiciously like Helen, before Margaret starts hissing something at Charles and bangs the phone down.

  
  


_Dear Hawkeye,_

> _You’re in Maine by now, probably clearing the dishes from breakfast. I really hope you're not planning on staying there forever. It’s 7:30 here and I've barely slept. I felt terrible all night. I didn't mean what I said. I miss you. I miss you. That’s stupid, you’ve only been gone twelve hours. But I miss you._

_Hawkeye,_

> _After you left for the airport I got drunk and broke a plate. Now I'm hungover and more miserable than I was six hours ago. What's wrong with me? Why am I telling you this? Also, the birdfeeder is empty._

_Hawkeye,_

> _I didn't eat breakfast. I think the cats are mad at me too. I have a hangover, which you don't want to hear. You’re also probably still angry. You’ve got most of your right to be, but when you're stressed out you can be hell to live with. I didn't think, which you don't want to hear either because that's a lousy excuse, but I don't know what else to say. I'm sorry._

_Hawk—_

> _You’re the one who was being a moron. How could I get bored of you?_

_Hawk—_

> _It was a stupid thing to say and I’m sorry. It wasn’t even true. I can't stand fighting with you. And for the record, I’m not bored, I never have been. Even my subconscious knows that— I dreamed about you last night. I missed you like hell when I woke up._
> 
> _Write/call when you have time. I’ll be moping around the phone._
> 
> _Love, BJ_

That's the one he mails. Two days later, Hawkeye writes back:

_Hunnicutt—_

> _You’re a moron. I’m still mad at you._
> 
> _Tell me about your dream. Don’t leave anything out. I’ll be waiting by the mailbox._
> 
> _— H_

_P.S. I can be curious and mad at the same time. I’m a complex person._

  
  


So BJ writes down everything he can remember about the dream-memory (memory-dream?), mails it, and doesn’t really expect a response. But three days later he comes home to a one-page letter from Hawkeye, detailing a dream he had about BJ trying to catch fish in a sombrero on a beach in Massachusetts. At first BJ thinks this is just Hawkeye being funny, or trying to see if he can get a rise out of him. But at the bottom, in nearly illegible handwriting, almost running off the page: 

_Damn subconscious. I think it misses you._

  
  


_Hawk,_

> _Last night we went to Las Vegas. You lost a mountain of pure gold shooting craps. When the teller told you to leave, you threatened to sue him. But we walked out of the casino arm in arm, and took off back home. We drove all night, and I think you fell asleep on the way. It didn’t matter because I was driving._
> 
> _My subconscious and I miss you too. (Or is that my ego? Freud would know. Probably has something to do with sex.)_
> 
> _Love, BJ_

_P.S. Do you know where my copy of Arrowsmith is? I can't find it anywhere._

  
  


He gets Hawkeye’s reply in two days: 

_BJ,_

> _How the hell would I know where your books are? Anyway, I had a similar dream last night— I'll tell you what sex has to do with it._

The rest of the letter is so unspeakably filthy that BJ is compelled to hide it under the sink and fill out some patient charts so that he won't drive himself crazy trying to figure out whether Hawkeye is really still angry at him. 

After an hour of working, he decides to pen an equally filthy response. _A taste of his own medicine_ , he smirks to himself as he digs through the junk drawer for stamps.

As they write back and forth for the next three weeks, the letters get longer, dirtier, and more frequent. By the end of their second week apart, BJ's nervous system has learned to jolt into action when he hears the mail truck coming down the street, head buzzing like a hormonal teenager until he finds Hawkeye's spiky handwriting. He props the letters up on the salt shaker while he eats dinner and analyzes Hawkeye's dreams, wondering if Hawkeye is doing the same for him. 

They don’t talk about the paper BJ’s writing, or the house repairs, or surgery, or Erin learning how to make eclairs. They write about their dreams; whether they’re real or made up for the sake of having something to write about, BJ can’t tell and doesn’t care. The only thing that matters is Hawkeye’s spiky handwriting going from _Hunnicutt_ to _BJ_ to _Dear BJ;_ going from _H_ to _Hawkeye_ to _Love, Hawk._ BJ feels like he’s twenty-eight years old again, feeling an electric current every time Hawkeye enters the room, heart speeding up every time a joke’s addressed to him, trying to read Hawkeye’s mind. The only difference is that now he knows why he feels this way. 

_It’s really strange but in some ways I’ve never felt closer to you_ , BJ writes three days before he leaves to join Hawkeye in Maine. _I don’t know how to explain it. Of course I’d rather you were here, or I was there. But it’s almost as though I can feel you everywhere._

 _Now you know what I felt like those six months when we were on opposite coasts_ , Hawkeye replies. 

  
  


“BJ!” says Daniel, wearing full fishing gear. “Come in, come in. Or should I call you Hunnicutt?”

BJ doesn't even get the chance to respond when Hawkeye yells from somewhere inside the house: “Beej! Is that you?”

Daniel nods. “Well, that answers the question.”

BJ smiles and calls back, “No! United Parcel Service!”

“Hang on, I’m coming!”

“He’s upstairs,” Daniel says just as Hawkeye clatters down the stairs, hair wet and sticking up in four different directions. 

“Hi,” he says a little breathlessly.

“Hi,” says BJ. “Miss me?”

“Like a hole in my handbag.” BJ’s smile is overtaking his face.

“Well, I’m going fishing,” Daniel says loudly. “Use protection.” Hawkeye yells " _DAD!"_ and BJ makes an undignified spluttering noise. Daniel just snickers and clomps out the door.

BJ watches him go, strangely nervous to be alone with Hawkeye— or not nervous but _giddy_ , like a teenager with big plans, taking the car out for the night. Which makes him feel faintly ridiculous, because he's forty years old, and he's practically married to Hawkeye, and they've only been apart three weeks. And yet when he finally turns back to Hawkeye, he sees the same giddy nerves mirrored in his posture, the same hesitant joy at being reunited. 

BJ smiles. “Are we that transparent?”

Hawkeye slowly walks down the remaining four stairs until he’s standing right in front of BJ. “You are. I’ve seen lobsters less red than you.”

"I bet you say that to all the boys," says BJ, and then Hawkeye's whole body is pressed against his and they're kissing hot and hungry in the hallway, Hawkeye's hands in BJ's hair, BJ fumbling for Hawkeye's belt loops, trying to mold their bodies together like it'll take the last three weeks away. 

Hawkeye pulls away when his back hits the wall, just long enough to manage, “Upstairs."

“Right behind you.”

  
  


When they’re spent, they lie quietly in bed, listening to each other’s breathing. Hawkeye turns on his side to twine his fingers through BJ’s chest hair, and leans in to kiss BJ's cheek. "Let's never do this again," he says very seriously.

BJ frowns. "The sex?"

Hawkeye rolls his eyes and gets out of bed. “No, the fighting before a trip. It’s no good," he calls over his shoulder as he heads to the bathroom.

“No, it’s bad."

“Precisely. Not good,” Hawkeye yells from the hallway. “You know how much money I spent on stamps?”

“Ask your dad to increase your allowance."

“I already had an advance on next week’s. And besides, I kept having to excuse myself for conspicuous amounts of time whenever the mail came.” He strolls back in and bends down to retrieve his boxers from where they were under the bed, but as he straightens, his eyes widen. "Oh, shit," he says before dissolving into laughter.

"What?"

"You— you put a crack in the wall," Hawkeye gasps in between cackles. BJ looks where he's pointing: behind the left bedpost, there is indeed a crack in the plaster where the bed's jolted against the wall.

"Me? Why am I responsible? Last I checked, you were there too!"

"Oh, no, no, no. _You_ were the one who did the heavy lifting."

"You were my accomplice."

Hawkeye wipes the tears from his eyes. "Well, I'm pleading not guilty. You seduced me."

BJ pretends to swoon. "Seduced!"

"Yes! With all your West Coast talk of 'clean living' and 'physical exercise.' I lived dirtily and never exercised before I met you, buster, and in all that time I never cracked any walls."

"I'll show you exercise—" BJ lunges forward and hauls him back into bed as they wrestle like teenagers. They quickly remember that they've spent the better part of an hour fucking, and that their middle-aged bodies don't have the energy for this. So they flop back down, sweaty shoulders pressed together, staring up at the ceiling. Breathing the same air. After a few minutes, BJ turns to look at him. 

"Hawk?"

"Yeah." His eyes are closed. 

"When we fought…" he swallows. Stops. Tries again. "Why'd you storm out like that?" He tries not to make it sound like an accusation, because it isn't. 

Hawkeye opens his eyes and rolls over to face BJ with a little sigh. It’s warm, but their legs are still tangled together in the sheets. “I was angry. This house… I know it's different for you. But I grew up here, for better or worse. It means something to me. If a fucking tree falls on half of it, then I've got to fix it. I can't let my dad do all the work if there's something I could be doing to help, you know?" And BJ does know. It isn’t really the same, but he’s been afraid of losing his home since he met Peg and made the idea of her into a home, since he accidentally did the same to Hawkeye in Korea. Since wild, stubborn, beautiful, someone’ll-have-to-get-me-pregnant Hawkeye moved into an actual house in California with him and somehow, unbelievably, didn’t get bored and leave BJ behind. 

"Hawk?"

"Yeah."

He doesn’t know what he’s going to say-- maybe _you scared the shit out of me,_ or _do you really need me,_ or _don’t laugh but my home is wherever you are._ Instead he says, "How would you feel about moving to Maine in a few years?" 

Hawkeye pushes up onto his elbows to look at him. "You're just saying that."

"No, I'm not."

"How do I know you're not just high on post-coital endorphins? Or trying to avoid an argument about the argument we had three weeks ago?"

"I'm not. You just have to take my word for it." Hawkeye doesn't say anything, but he nods. "Look, the real reason we stayed— I stayed— in California was for Erin. But now she's thirteen. She's got five more years of school, and then she's off to college. After that, she'll be visiting us, not living with us. And she can just as easily visit us in Maine as in California."

Hawkeye narrows his eyes. "What about work?"

"With our skills? We'll find work wherever we go, as long as you don't keep pissing off the chief of surgery."

"That was two times, and he deserved it both of 'em. Anyway, I don't want his lousy reference letters. What about everyone over there?"

"Peg and Yvette will be fine. So will everyone else. We'll go back and visit."

"Where will we stay? I'm not living in my father's house again— this bed is too damn small for both of us." Hawkeye is starting to warm to the fantasy, which isn't really a fantasy, but BJ is okay letting him be suspicious for a while.

"We'll find a house. Doesn't even have to be in this town if you want."

"No, here is okay. But what will we do?"

"You tell me."

For all his suspicion, Hawkeye barely has to think about his answer. "We'll go fishing all the time. Put out lobster traps. Wear heavy sweaters. We can go skiing— four actual seasons! You can rake the leaves once they start falling."

"I already do that."

"Well, California autumn isn't a patch on autumn here. And we're going to have a lot of trees. No Norway maples, though."

"Of course not. And in the summer, we'll make jam, I suppose."

"Yeah. Blackberry, no pect—" he stops. "You know, I think I had that dream once already."

BJ looks up at him. "I don't remember that from the letters."

"No. Before that." He hops out of bed and paces the floor, scanning the ground until he finds a floorboard that appears to be exactly the same as all the others and jumps on it until it pops up. Hawkeye kneels on the ground and prises it up until the gap is big enough to stick his arm through. After a minute of casting around, he grins and yanks out a set of small papers, rubber-banded together. As he lopes back into bed, BJ realizes that it's actually sheets from a prescription pad, and that each one is covered in Hawkeye's spiky scrawl.

"Are those—" 

"Yep. These are the dreams." Hawkeye gets back into bed, tapping the stack against the mattress to punctuate his words: "Every single attempt." He looks down at BJ, almost like he's waiting for something.

BJ takes the stack gently and turns it over in his hands. There's something about seeing the pile of words, six months' worth of trying to find him without ever picking up the phone or writing a letter— he can't decide whether to laugh at how classically Hawkeye the whole thing is, or to wrap him in his arms and never get out of bed. 

Each time BJ's heard the story of how they met, it's been slightly different— a date here, a dream-plotline there. Hawkeye is giving him a choice: he can look at the papers and piece the story together for himself, figure out which dreams really happened and which were just embellishment. Or he can let Hawkeye keep telling the story. Allow it to grow and sprout new branches, to keep changing and to keep being told. 

It’s also a peace offering-- Hawkeye acknowledging that he was wrong to yell and storm out, the best way that he knows how. It’s his way of asking, _are you still satisfied with what I'm giving you?_ And the answer, of course, is _yes._

BJ hands the stack back to Hawkeye. "I don't want to mess the order up." Hawkeye relaxes against the headboard— he's said the right thing.

"It should be around the end of the stack." BJ watches the tendons in the back of Hawkeye's hands dance as he flicks through the papers. "Here— January fifth. 'Lots of wine, but not quite drunk. Thought about winter in Maine, and how much I missed the snow over there, real snow. Dreamed he and I made blackberry jam in the kitchen. It was summer, boiling hot. We kept sampling it so that by the time we were done we'd eaten nearly half. I laughed at him when he burned his tongue and he threw berries at my head.'"

BJ laughs. "Sounds about right."

"Yeah. I felt funny walking through the kitchen for a while after that. I remember thinking about it when I got Peg's letter." He settles back down onto BJ's chest. 

"Tell me again."

Hawkeye's voice travels through BJ's chest when he speaks. "You missed my dulcet tones when I was away, huh?"

"You don't have to."

"Ha. I never turn down a challenge." BJ smiles to himself, knowing that Hawkeye can't see him. Thunder rumbles somewhere in the distance; Daniel will be on his way back soon. They have all the time in the world. 

"The mail came on Sunday, but the letter from Nevada was postmarked a week earlier…"

*******

"Hayden? That's— what? That can't be right." He snatched it from her hands and felt his heart plummet through the floor. He had seen that handwriting at least once a week for two years, had watched it blur and fade as BJ rubbed his big thumb over the return address, had learned to identify it from just the looping C in "California": there was the same letter in Crabapple Cove. 

"I thought she took BJ's last name when they married," he heard Margaret say, but she sounded like she was underwater.

"She did." He stared at the envelope, still damp from the snow.

Margaret let him stare at it for another minute before she got tired of waiting for him to do something. "Give it here." He watched his hands give the envelope back; felt his knees lowering him into a chair. She took a knife from the drying rack and slit it neatly. "Do you want me to read it to you?"

"No. Yes. I don't know. Read it first and then tell me if I should throw up."

She nodded and unfolded the letter. "It's dated a week ago." 

"Who cares?" Hawkeye felt like his internal organs were trying to leave his body. 

Margaret huffed. "I just thought it might be a relevant detail. Evidently I was wrong." She only got as far as _Dear Hawkeye_ before he ran outside and threw up in the snow.

"Well?" Margaret said when he came back. She raised one eyebrow at him: _Time to find out._

"Move over. We'll read it together." They stood shoulder-to-shoulder as Margaret unfolded the letter and read:

  
  


_Dear Hawkeye,_

> _We've never met, and yet from all the stories I've read and heard, I feel I know you very well. Or at least well enough to write this letter to you._
> 
> _There's no easy way to say it, but I wanted you to hear it from me, in case BJ hasn't told you yet. We're getting divorced. We've moved to Reno so we can establish six weeks residency (hence the Nevada postmark). We've already been here three weeks— pretty soon it'll be over, and we'll head back to California, apart at last._
> 
> _Why is another story— suffice it to say it's been coming for a long time. (Six months, a year, two, ten.) He's not the same person he was when he went away. Neither am I. It's for the best, I think. We both deserve to be happy._
> 
> _I guess what I'm trying to say is that there are things I don't understand: what you went through over there, what you did, what you saw, why BJ sometimes wakes up yelling for you in the middle of the night. But I do understand that he can be as stubborn as a mule (from what I've heard, so can you), and I understand that he loves you very much. As far as I'm concerned, that's the most important thing. So I hope you two make each other happy for a long time._
> 
> _Yours sincerely,_
> 
> _Peg Hayden._
> 
>   
>    
> 

"What the _fuck_ is that supposed to mean," said Hawkeye. 

"He loves you," said Margaret. "I thought that was obvious."

"No, not that— well, actually, yes that! What does Peg _mean_ with that— make each other _happy_ stuff, Jesus Christ, that's what you say to people who you don't like who just got engaged! And that's not even mentioning the fact that— hang on, are we just _ignoring_ the fact that Life Magazine's Husband and Wife Team of the Korean War are getting divorced?"

"Nobody's ignoring it. Peg said right there that it was because they'd both changed. That happens in war, you know." Margaret didn't say it sadly, only as a fact. 

Hawkeye shoved a hand through his hair. "Yeah, but— but this doesn't make any sense."

"What doesn't?" A tangle of answers spun around in his head: _Peg obviously didn't know that BJ wasn't writing to me— Jesus, he moved to Reno and didn't tell me. He's getting a divorce and didn't tell me either, and we're supposed to be best friends. He calls for me in his sleep. He dreams about me._

Hawkeye stared at the coffee pot on the stove. A dream-memory surfaced: BJ in a t-shirt and jeans, stirring something in a saucepan, holding a wooden spoon out to him. 

"Who's leaving who?"

Margaret scanned the letter, then again. "Huh. She didn't say." She looked up at him. "You're going to call her, aren't you." It wasn't a question.

"You're the one who said it's better to know."

"This wasn't really what I meant," she said, but she set her coffee down and smiled. "I guess I should have known that you'd interpret as you saw fit."

"Probably," he said and smiled back over his shoulder as he turned to the phone on the wall.

"Hello?" said a beautifully clear voice. Hawkeye had watched BJ's anniversary tape three times. The first with Klinger, to make sure that the tape hadn't been damaged in transit. The second alone, the night before the party, just to torture himself with visions of what he couldn't have. By the time he saw it for the third time at the party, he had nearly memorized Peg's lines. It had been over a year; he'd made himself forget everything Peg said in the tape so that he wouldn't go crazy (not that it had worked). But he remembered the voice.

"Is this Peg Hayden?"

"Yes. To whom am I speaking?"

"Hawkeye Pierce."

"Ah." She didn't sound especially surprised. "I was wondering when I would hear from you."

"I just have one question. Who filed for divorce?"

A pause. "The decision was mutual. But I'm the one who brought it up first."

"Then you're even crazier than I am."

"Excuse me?" There's a hint of the woman BJ told him about: stubborn and cool. 

"How could you leave him? He's— he's the most devoted family man I know! Husband of the year! Do you know that he memorized every single one of your two hundred and fifty-one letters? Every single one! He recited them so often that even I memorized a few! _That's_ how much he loves you, and you're splitting up because of— what, a little personality change? Pardon my French, but what is _wrong_ with you?

There was a long pause before she said, "Excuse me?" Peg's voice was quiet and dangerous in the exact way that BJ's was when he was angry and hungover. Hawkeye wondered if he had learned it from her. 

"There's nothing to excuse! How could you—"

"Now wait just a minute. How dare you make it all my fault? You think he's the only one who changed? You think it was easy for me, being all by myself, working two jobs and raising a child? Well, it wasn't, not by a long shot. We were both different, both miserable— _he_ was miserable, Hawkeye. I watched him, writing these long letters and never sending them, wondering who they were for." As she talked, some of the anger seemed to fade from her voice. "I watched him standing by the phone, lifting and replacing the receiver over and over again. He made jokes I couldn't understand and seemed to fade a little when I didn't laugh. Eventually I realized it was all for you— your letters, your phone calls, your laughter. And yet there we were. Both acting as though nothing had changed. Then I was miserable too."

"I'm sorry," Hawkeye whispers.

"Don't be. It wasn't your fault." She laughed a little. "It's funny that you're offering me condolences. I remember thinking that I was grieving him, somehow. Grieving everything I'd lost. Everyone."

"Everyone? BJ's just one guy."

"There was… another person." Silence. The line hissed faintly.

"You cheated on him? With— someone else, some ordinary guy?" Hawkeye almost didn't recognize his own voice when it clawed its way from his throat.

"No." Another pause, but this one felt deliberate. Like there was another meaning she was waiting for him to understand. "I fell in love."

"You fell in love," he repeated numbly. He had the sudden urge to laugh, or cry, or rip the receiver from its cord, or lie down on the floor, or to drag Margaret down to New York with him and trash the first gay bar they could find.

"It's—" she stopped. "It's a long story."

Margaret was watching him, not even pretending not to eavesdrop. She nodded, as if to say, _go on._ Hawkeye nodded back. "I have time."

"Okay," she said, seeming almost surprised that he'd asked. "Okay. The story goes like this." Hawkeye leaned forward to rest his head against the wall. "There was a young woman, whose husband had gone away and left her to take care of their daughter alone. He hadn't wanted to go, but that didn't make it any easier. Well, there was nothing for her to do except get a little harder and learn to take care of herself. She got a job, and found she liked it. Eventually she had to take a second job. Her husband wasn’t too crazy about it, but she had to pay the bills. Being on her feet all day, then taking care of her little girl all night… it kept her from worrying too hard about her husband and what he might be up to, or how she was going to make it through to the next day. She started taking long walks with her daughter, just wandering around, trying to keep her mind quiet. One evening she stumbled into a bakery, just as they were about to close.

"The woman behind the counter was named Yvette, and she swore up and down at me for keeping her open late, but then I—" Peg faltered, the illusion of the story broken. "I got angry. I told her that was no way to treat a customer. She was so impressed that she gave Erin a free eclair."

He laughed a little at the image. "Some first impression."

"I didn't expect anything would come of that meeting, but over the next few months, we became close. She watched Erin when I had to work extra shifts, brought me food when she learned that I was a lousy cook. I helped her with the bakery's accounts and fixed her leaky sink…" she trailed off. "I met someone who showed me that my life could be different. That I could be different. And then I broke it off, thinking it would be for the best."

Hawkeye wasn't sure if he should be impressed at her self-restraint or fall onto his knees and beg her forgiveness. "Just like that?"

"It broke my heart to leave her." She was calm, but he could hear a faint tremor in her voice. "But I didn't want to abandon my husband. So I put what I felt away, locked it up in a little box, not knowing that BJ had met someone like that too."

"Someone like that?" Hawkeye repeated, gripping the phone tighter, pressing it closer to his ear like it would change what he'd heard. 

"He met you." Her voice was remarkably level, all traces of her previous anger scrubbed away. 

"No," he whispered. "No, no, that's not right." He held the receiver away from him. Peg said something about how she'd waited a few months to confront BJ about it, but Hawkeye barely registered it. 

"I need— can I speak to him? Is he there?" Margaret crept closer.

"No, he's in his own place. Closer to the clinic where he picked up work. But Hawkeye, he's not—" He slammed the phone down, blood thrumming in his ears.

Margaret yanked at his sleeve. "What did she say?"

"He's in his own place; I'll have to call."

"You dolt, you didn't get the number from her?"

"I panicked!" He began to dial the number for Reno again. He drummed his fingers on the table and sang under his breath: " _The gentleman is a dope, he isn't very smart, he's just a lug you'd like to hug…_ "

"And hold against your heart?" Margaret finished.

"Shut up, Margaret. Hello? Operator? Yeah, I'm looking for a BJ Hunnicutt, that's with two n's and two t's… Okay. Yeah, I'll wait." His heart flipped as he imagined BJ's voice, a little fuzzy like it always was in the morning, zipping through the telephone wire and saying his name. BJ rubbing his eyes and stretching his back as he picked up the phone, BJ's unshaven jaw pressed against the other end of the receiver, BJ's voice _there_ and saying—

"Hello?" It was a woman. 

Hawkeye cleared his throat. "Uh, hi, is this BJ Hunnicutt's house?"

"Oh, yeah." His stomach seized up and tried to jump out of his body via his throat. _Peg was completely wrong, he's got a new girlfriend and oh God, she's spent the_ night— "He's out of town right now, though. I'm just house-sitting for him."

"Out— out of town?" Margaret's eyes widened and she ran for the upstairs extension. 

"Yeah. He's, like, gone. Vermont, I think he said."

"You _think_ he said?"

"Wait, no, Maine. Northeast somewhere." Hawkeye's intestines decided to follow his stomach and make a break for it. 

"Okay, think hard. Maine or Vermont? There's a pretty big difference between the two, you know."

The girl sighed into the receiver. "Who cares?"

Hawkeye thumped the wall and resisted the urge to scream _I CARE!_ He forced himself to take a deep breath before saying, "Look, I'm… a friend. I really need to speak to him, and it's important that I know where he is so that I can try and get ahold of him."

"Oh, wait. He gave me an emergency number to call in case the house burns down or something. Let me find it." Hawkeye counted thirty-seven Mississippis before she said, "Got it. It says: Dear Jean, thanks for your help. If you need anything, call Peg Hayden in Reno— uh, and then there's her phone number… In case of an emergency where you need to reach me, don't break the glass— call Crabapple Cove, Maine. Ask for Hawkeye Pierce. Yes, that's his name. If you can't get him, try asking for Daniel Pierce. Emergencies only."

"Fuck."

"Excuse me?"

"Thanks for your help and all, but I think I'm going to throw up," Hawkeye said, and hung up again. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks once again to the inimitable [finesunnyday](https://archiveofourown.org/users/finesunnyday/pseuds/finesunnyday) for beta reading, and to everyone who left comments and kudos on the past two chapters! You all really make my day. I hope to have the last chapter up in about two weeks, but more accurate updates can be found at @dykemulcahy on tumblr :)


	4. 1969

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> May 1969 and January 1954.

When BJ wakes up, he finds Hawkeye still asleep next to him, and thinks, _I've had this dream before._ But he pinches himself, and the floor is still littered with their clothes from last night, and there's still an issue of the _Journal of Pediatric Surgery_ hanging off Hawkeye's bedside lamp, and it's still a foggy Saturday, and Hawkeye is still asleep at 8:20 on the morning of their fifteenth anniversary in this house. 

It feels like it can't be real— both because Hawkeye hardly ever sleeps in this late, and because the thought of all those days passing makes BJ feel dizzy, as though he's adrift in time and space. Fifteen years seems like eternity. Fifteen years feels like a few minutes.

He should get out of bed. Make breakfast, get the paper in, listen to the weather, put a record on. Instead he watches Hawkeye breathe slowly and evenly. 

BJ is struck by the thought that if he stays still enough, the years will fall away and he'll see Hawkeye as he was when they first met: hair still mostly black, fewer crows' feet, rail-thin, hands always curled into half-fists when he slept so he could push off the bed quicker. It's an absurd idea, but it has him moving closer to Hawkeye, and the years they've had together remain solidly in place. 

He knows he’s being irrational, but BJ can’t help studying Hawkeye’s arms, searching for the evidence that this is real, that their lives have really happened. The curving scar of a shallow scratch on his bicep from when he'd tried to bathe Marlene after she fell into the toilet three years ago. A bruise on his forearm from when he tripped over the dog a few days ago. Two paper cuts from sorting and boxing all his surgical journals yesterday, although they don't move to Maine for another two months. A tiny burn scar on his right index finger: hot oil from an omelette made at midnight on BJ's 40th birthday, six years ago. 

A line of poetry floats through his head: “What good does all the research of the Impressionists do them when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank…” Someone famous said that; he can't remember who. Hawkeye will know. 

_Or if they never got the right person to lie in bed with their face crushed against the pillow,_ BJ thinks as he reaches over and rubs Hawkeye's wrist. Hawkeye instinctively tenses as he blinks awake (a habit he still hasn't broken) but he relaxes back into the mattress as soon as he sees BJ.

Hawkeye squints and rubs his eyes, smiling a little. "You're up early."

"I have a question." Hawkeye nods. "There's this poem that goes, _what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them when they never got the right person to stand near the tree…_ do you know it?"

"Yeah. It's from, uh, 'Having a Coke with You' by Frank O'Hara. Why?"

"I couldn't remember the author, but I knew you would."

He blinks slowly at BJ. "You woke me up for _that?_ " 

BJ shrugs. "It was bothering me."

"Oh yeah? For how long?"

BJ pretends to think about it. "Well, I've been up for about fifteen minutes… so I'd say it was bothering me for about a minute, give or take ten seconds."

His eyes widen in outrage. "Fifteen lousy minutes?" BJ grins and doesn't even bother ducking when Hawkeye hits him with his pillow. "That's it? And here I was giving you the benefit of the doubt, thinking maybe this was just your twisted way of saying _happy anniversary, I already got up and there are eggs waiting on the table!_ "

BJ laughs and wraps an arm around Hawkeye's waist to pull him closer. "You got the first part right. Happy anniversary." He kisses Hawkeye quickly on the mouth. 

"Fifteen whole years," Hawkeye says when they separate. "What's the traditional gift for your fifteenth anniversary?"

"Uh, crystal. Or a watch, I think. But that's for wedding anniversaries, not moving-into-a-house-together anniversaries."

Hawkeye clicks his tongue dismissively. "Same thing. Hey, how come we don’t have any champagne in the bedside table?” 

“Wouldn’t fit, remember? We tried that back in '61.” 

“Oh, yeah. And then you thought it would be a good idea to try and lift the fridge up the stairs by yourself so we could have champagne in bed even though you could have just brought the bo—” BJ rolls half on top of him and kisses the scar on his upper lip. When he pulls away, Hawk’s eyes are hazy. 

“I like it when you do that,” he rasps. 

BJ smiles. “I know. That’s why I do it.”

“Oh,” Hawkeye says, and leans in to kiss him again. 

BJ had fully intended to tease Hawk for a while, to make him squirm and hiss as BJ ground against him and refused to move lower, to touch him until he yanked at BJ’s hair and begged him to get on with it. (After all, what was the point of not taking call on your anniversary weekend if you weren’t going to make the most of it?) But then BJ feels Hawk hard against his thigh and decides that there will be time to tease him properly later. He's tonguing at a spot above Hawk’s collarbone that always makes him writhe and curse, about to move lower when Hawk speaks.

“Beej, wait.” Hawkeye's staring out the window. The two deep lines between his eyebrows are back. “Look.” 

BJ sighs and turns his head. “What am I looking at, Hawk?”

“The Nelsons cut down the tree in their front yard.”

“…And they replaced that ugly shrub with lantanas.” 

Hawkeye huffs impatiently. “No, you moron, just—” He yanks BJ down onto his chest, wrapping one arm around BJ’s neck to keep him in place and the other around his back. “Okay, now. Pay attention. Turn your face towards the window and close your eyes.”

“Hawk, why—”

“Just do it. You’ll see.”

A car moving down the street. Birds. Someone trying and failing to start a lawnmower. Hawkeye’s heart rate, slightly elevated, and the smell of his sweat. And the faint sunlight, coming through the glass—

“This light remind you of anything?” Hawkeye asks, as though he knows exactly what BJ was thinking.

“The Swamp.”

“Exactly.” Hawkeye’s fingers scratch absently at the short hairs on the back of BJ’s neck, the way he does when BJ stumbles into the house after a long case. BJ wonders if he knows he's doing it.

“In late spring, when the days started to get longer—”

“And the grass started to come back. Yeah.” 

For a long moment, neither of them say anything. BJ closes his eyes and imagines the mattress sticking to his back, the permanent smell of sweat and blood and harsh soap, the sound of rats scratching under someone’s bed, the dew clinging to the mesh walls. If it weren’t for the unmistakable sensation of Hawkeye Pierce in bed with him, BJ would swear he was back in 1951. 

Too late, he realizes that Hawkeye’s been thinking about Korea too: his breathing is starting to get shallow, and his fingers lightly tap an erratic rhythm on BJ’s shoulder. BJ searches for something to diffuse the tension, but all he can think of is the tent’s ceiling, watching the shadows fade as the sun crept in over Hawkeye’s bed—

He speaks before he can even realize what story he’s telling. “My first summer in Korea, those two weeks we slept with the tent flaps up, there was one morning when the sun shone right in my eyes—” BJ stops. “Did I tell you this story?”

“I don’t think so. Tell me anyway.”

“Oh. Well, it was about five in the morning. Late July, early August. We’d been in surgery all the day before, and the stupid sun was right in my eyes, and I was about to call out to you, tell you to put the canvas down so I could get some rest. But then I looked up, and there you were. Sprawled out face-down on your cot, fast asleep."

"Big deal. You saw me passed out every day."

"No, this time was different. I'd never been up that early before when you were still asleep. The way the light was hitting you— I don't know." He stops, a little embarrassed. 

"Sure you know, or you wouldn't have started this story. Come on, tell me how ravishing I looked." The hand on BJ's back pokes him in the ribs. 

"Who said you looked ravishing?"

"Well, didn't I?"

BJ laughs. "Yeah. Yeah, you did." A beat. "At first I thought maybe I was still dreaming, because the light made it look like you were outlined in gold. I couldn't look away. Didn't want to. I was afraid I'd wake up and you'd be gone." Hawkeye’s hands go still on BJ's nape. “Must have sat there for ten minutes, just watching your face. The way the sun touched your calves. How the silver in your hair reflected the light. And I was going to say something to wake you up, I swore to myself, but nothing came out.”

“Beej.” 

“I didn't understand it at the time, but I felt… lucky. Like the sun had woken me up just to show me what you looked like at peace. You were beautiful. I couldn't disturb you. So I just turned onto my other side and went back to bed without complaining.” He props himself up on one elbow and finds Hawkeye looking back, eyebrows drawn together. 

Hawkeye snorts. “Probably sleep deprivation doing a number on your visual cortex.”

“No. You were beautiful,” he says firmly. “Still are.” That got a small smile. BJ lay down again. Hawkeye went back to playing with BJ’s hair, and was quiet for all of five seconds before he said, "Hang on. This happened in the summer of 1951?"

"Yeah. Why?"

"Beej, that was nearly twenty years ago. How come I never heard this story before?"

"I don't know. It never came up."

Hawkeye sat up in outrage, dislodging BJ. "It never— boy, you are unbelievable."

"Hawk, it's not like I was intentionally keeping a secret from you! I just didn't think about it because until today, our neighbors' landscaping wasn't giving us war flashbacks."

"Do you know what this means?" Hawkeye doesn't wait for him to answer. "If you even _thought_ you were dreaming about me in the summer of 1951, and I didn't start actually dreaming about you until that same fall, then the story of how we met again starts even earlier than I thought it did."

"I thought it started at Kimpo."

"That was the first time we met."

"Yeah, but if we hadn't met the first time, we couldn't have met the second time, so technically the real beginning is there."

BJ only says this to rile Hawkeye up, knowing that he'll start going on about how there's no real singular beginning because that isn't how life works. He's right, but BJ isn't about to admit it because then he'd lose one of his most reliable ways to drive Hawkeye crazy. He tunes back in just in time to hear Hawkeye say, "In conclusion, once again, you are an idiot. There's no such thing as a perfect beginning."

"No such thing as a perfect end either." 

"I don't know, Beej. Death seems pretty final."

"Nah. Our friends and family would still know the story. They'd keep telling it, and over time, it'd change and grow. One day people we can't even imagine will know our names."

Hawkeye laughs almost to himself and says, "I guess it's a good thing Erin knows this story by heart."

BJ laces their hands together over Hawkeye's stomach, because it's easier than saying _I'd remember you if we were both dead._ Hawkeye squeezes BJ's hand, which is easier for him than saying _so would I._

They lay there for a while, staring at the ceiling, neither trying to read the other’s mind. After either a few minutes or fifteen years, BJ stretches and sits up.

“Beej?” He leans over and kisses Hawk on the mouth quickly.

“Get up, lover. Let’s move the bed.”

“You’re just going to leave me like this?”

“Come on, Hawk.”

“Well, that’s what I was _going_ to do until you decided otherwise,” Hawkeye grumbles, but climbs out anyway. Fifteen minutes, three dust-related sneezing fits, one stubbed toe, and countless displaced pieces of dirty laundry later, the room is in total disarray and they're yelling at each other about the most efficient way to move an armoire. (“On its side! That way you can see where you’re going before you trip over your size nineteens!” “Not unless you want to put scratches on the floor and put your back out in the process!”) Thirty minutes and one threat to call Peg to settle the matter after that, the bed is in place between the windows, and the armoire hasn’t moved at all. 

“Okay, now lie down,” BJ sighs. “How does it look?”

Hawkeye flops down on his stomach and turns his head to squint at BJ. “Light’s fine. The rest of the view is pretty good too. You know, you’re cute when you’re moving my bed across the room completely naked.” BJ snorts and sits down on the edge of the bed next to Hawkeye. 

“Our neighbors probably think so too. Damn, we should have drawn the curtains.”

Hawkeye rolls onto his side and taps BJ’s wrist, suddenly serious. “You didn’t have to do that.”

BJ shrugs and smiles. “The room looks better this way anyway.” Hawkeye grins and pulls him down by the wrist again. They are together in the morning, with the sun still fighting the fog and time stretching out, ahead, forward, back to them. 

*******

Hawkeye slid down the wall to the kitchen floor and tried not to hyperventilate, which was where Margaret found him when she ran back downstairs. "What are we going to do?"

"We?"

"Yes, we! You're implicated!"

She threw her hands up in the air. "What the fuck do _I_ have to do with any of this? This is _your_ drama!"

"Moral support! And it isn't drama!" He got up and started pacing around the kitchen. 

Margaret rolled her eyes. "That's stupid."

"Stupid— this is _not_ stupid. _Stupid_ is divorcing your wife and leaving your home in the care of someone who doesn't know the difference between Maine and Vermont to come speak to— me! I mean, what does that blockhead Hunnicutt think he's playing at?

"I think he wants to talk to you," she said flatly.

"Oh my— Jesus Christ, Margaret, we need to burn this place down."

"What?"

He ran to the hallway closet and started shoving his boots on. "My dad probably won't even be mad, he's been talking about getting a nicer place for years. Do you have spare gasoline in your car?"

"Are you— are you having an episode?" She sounded genuinely concerned about him, but he was too panicked to care.Everything was happening too fast; his pulse sounded like a construction site in his ears. _Dad's left, Trapper left, BJ left, Margaret's about to leave, Peg's leaving BJ, BJ left California— no, fucking_ Nevada _and now he's on his way to Maine, to here, to me—_

 _"_ No I'm not having an _episode,_ this isn't a— a TV show! What are we going to do, he's on his way! I can't talk to him now! I haven't had any time to rehearse, I don't know my lines, and there's no way I can get an understudy on such short notice—"

"What are you talking about?"

"—so the only way to stall the show is to just burn the goddamn set down, then he'll _have_ to go back to his real life—"

Margaret grabbed his shoulders. " _Hawkeye."_

"What, what? We need to get going, you know, we probably don't have that much time."

"Hawkeye Pierce, shut up right now."

"But—"

"Here's what we're going to do." _We,_ his brain registered through the fog of panic. _Not alone for now._

"Great. I love a woman who takes charge," said his mouth, evidently running on autopilot.

"I know. Take your boots off and give me all your shoes from the closet." He did. Margaret gathered them up into a heap, walked to the back porch, and dumped the mass at her feet. As Hawkeye watched in baffled silence, she hefted his left snowboot in her hand, as though she were testing its weight, wound up, and threw it into the snow. 

"Margaret, what the hell are you doing?"

"The tree line is what, thirty yards from where we're standing? I think I can make that," she said almost to herself.

"That didn't answer my question— those are my fucking shoes!" He tried to grab her arm, but nearly got hit in the face by a boot as it sailed through the air. 

"I'm aware of that," she said calmly, picking up a pair of tennis shoes. "You're the one who gave them to me."

Hawkeye fought the urge to throttle her. "Why are you throwing them into the snow?" He tried to snatch the shoes away from her, but she dodged him neatly. 

"Simple. If you don't have shoes, you can't run." 

"They're _my_ shoes!" he yelled. "Shouldn't it be _my_ decision what to do with them?" He started to move down the back stairs but nearly slipped on a patch of black ice and quickly remembered that he was wearing house slippers.

She snorted and lobbed a set of loafers over his head. "If I left it up to you, you'd sneak out to the airport and never find out what BJ's coming for." Hawkeye watched his shoes crunch down to earth about fifty feet away.

"Maybe I don't want to know."

"Your little dream journal says different, loverboy." He couldn't really argue with that logic. He didn't bother trying to snatch them after that. 

Five minutes later, Margaret stood triumphantly with her hands on her hips, surveying her work. Hawkeye gloomily wondered if she had actually just come to Maine to make him suffer. "Now what?" he asked. 

"Now we're going to clean the house."

"Why? BJ's a slob, he won't care." 

"Well, I care, and I wouldn't want any future boyfriend of mine showing up with my place looking like this."

"He's not—" 

"First we'll do the floors, then the kitchen, then the bedroom, then the bath. That should be enough to keep you from getting too twitchy," she said briskly as she hung her robe on the banister and rolled up the sleeves of her pajama shirt, which appeared to be one of Donald's old oxfords.

"How the hell am I gonna get my shoes back? It's below zero out there, I can't walk to get them in my bare feet."

"Simple. I'll go get your boots before I leave."

"Leave?"

"It's Sunday. I have to go back today."

"But you just got here."

"Hawkeye, you don't need me here for this. Go fill a bucket with warm water; I'll roll up the carpets."

"Are you sure you can't stay?" he asked as he hauled a bucket of clean water into the front hallway. 

“I have work tomorrow morning at seven, and I’m not jeopardizing my hard-earned, well-paying new job for you two idiots. It isn’t my fault that you don’t know how to communicate. Where the hell is your mop?”

He scoffed and pointed at the hall closet. “You're one to talk. How long have you been making invisible goo-goo eyes at Helen Whitfield?”

“Do you want me to throw all your clothes into the snow too? I’m sure BJ wouldn’t mind. Nothing he hasn’t already seen," she said with a smirk. "Soap, Doctor."

“I’ll throw you into the snow,” Hawkeye mumbled mutinously as he trudged to the kitchen.

  
  


"Okay, now what?" he asked an hour and a half later as he sat on the shining floor. The kitchen gleamed. The cushions in the living room looked like marshmallows. Every shoe— well, all of his father's shoes— had been martialed into perfectly even rows in the hall closet. 

Margaret sighed and pushed off his shoulder to stand."Go upstairs and take a shower. You smell like bleach. And shave while you're at it." She strolled back into the gleaming kitchen and sat down at the table, sipping absently at Hawkeye's mug of now-cold coffee.

"He doesn't care if I shave or not. Or have you forgotten the caterpillar that's been living on his lip for the last year and a half?" Did BJ even still have a mustache? Hawkeye realized that he didn't know, and felt his stomach turn.

"Nobody likes beard rash," Margaret said from behind the newspaper. "Don't use all the hot water."

Twenty minutes later, she banged on his bedroom door and demanded to know what was taking him so long. When he opened it, she looked at him as though he had an extra head (which wasn't unusual for Margaret). "You're wearing that?"

"What's wrong with it? Clean shirt, jeans, flannel, socks. Underwear— you can look if you don't believe me."

"That _shirt—"_ she said it like a dirty word. _"—_ has a hole in the hem. Find another one." 

"This one goes with the flannel I'm wearing."

"So get another flannel."

He found one in what he thought was a fetching shade of burgundy and held it out for her approval. "What do you think?"

Margaret grimaced. "It smells like mothballs. He won't want to kiss you in that."

He threw his hands in the air. "For fuck's— Again with this! He doesn't want to kiss me!"

She snorted and muscled past him into the closet. "You're so deep in denial you could be King Tut."

He laughed in spite of himself; it was a BJ-level pun. "That's terrible."

"I know. I must be delirious from spending too much time around you. Here, put this one on." He hadn't even tucked it into his pants when she clicked her tongue. "Your shoulders look lumpy."

After thirty-five minutes, every single pair of pants he owned, and three different pairs of socks, Hawkeye got fed up and kicked her out so he could put his original outfit on, hole in the hem be damned. "Are you absolutely sure you can't stay?" he yelled through the door as he wrestled his shirt on. 

"From the way you just hurled me out of your room, I thought you didn't want me here!"

"I didn't hurl you—"

"And yes, I'm absolutely sure. This is something you've got to do on your own. And _don't_ give me those sad eyes; they don't work on Houlihans." Although he was being yelled at, Hawkeye was grudgingly impressed at her ability to see his facial expressions through doors. "But if— and only if— it all goes to hell, then you can come down to Boston and we can destroy Charles' house."

"Together?"

"Charles will have his cook chop you into little bits if I let you trash the place on your own, but he's scared of me," she said as he swung the door open. 

"How do I look? Presentable?"

"Alright," she said at last. "I suppose, if he's into that sort of thing, he'd find you attractive."

"Everyone does," he said, grinning as wide as possible to cover for his sudden nausea.

"I don't," Margaret said dryly, but she straightened his collar and kissed his cheek all the same. "Make lunch, would you, dear? I need to shower before I hit the road."

Hawkeye was taking out the bread for sandwiches when his eyes fell upon the packet of dreams, still lying on the counter next to an empty mug. 

It couldn't just return to his bedside table— what if BJ had to stay overnight? Ignoring the fact that this was a ridiculous, self-indulgent fantasy that would never actually happen, Hawkeye would have to sleep on the sofa and give up his room as a good host, leaving BJ to find the incriminating evidence of Hawkeye's undying homosexual love for him. 

No, he decided, it would have to be hidden in the safest of secret places. He ran back upstairs to his room and counted off six steps from the doorway, then shuffled left until he felt the loose board. It took a few minutes of jumping and cursing, but it finally sprang up. He lay on his stomach and felt around until his fingers hit cardboard. After another minute of contorting and wiggling, he dragged the gray box into the light; it looked smaller than he remembered. 

He turned it over in his hands and pictured its contents. He closed his eyes and imagined that the box was his heart, that he was holding it outside his body and dissecting it, peeling back layers of tissue and muscle. _The pericardium is made of three layers,_ whispered a voice that sounded like his old anatomy professor. _Epicardium, myocardium, endocardium._

He shook the lid open. On top: a newspaper article with a coded message hidden in it and a single argyle shoelace (Tommy), a candy wrapper folded into a paper airplane, stained with green paint (Carlye), a book of matches from a hotel on the Ginza and a coil of wire from the still (Trapper). Hawkeye looked down at the dream journal in his hands. Rubbed his thumb over the curling edges. "Epicardium, myocardium, endocardium," he whispered. 

The floorboards in the hallway squeaked. He nearly fell on his face scrambling to throw everything under the floor and force the loose board back down; the thought of having to explain the box full of keepsakes made him want to jump out of his skin. When Margaret looked in, she saw only a slightly disheveled Hawkeye squatting in the middle of the room. 

"What are you doing?"

"Yoga. Stretching out the muscles in my lower back."

"I'm sure you are," she said slowly. "I thought you were making sandwiches."

"I was, but then there was too much tension in my back to cut the bread, so I came back up here. For the ambiance. Yoga really shouldn't be done in the kitchen."

She shook her head and sighed. "It's a good thing BJ and I are both fluent in total horseshit."

Hawkeye slammed the back door shut and stood with his hands in his pockets, rocking back and forth on his toes. 

"Well," said Margaret with a puff of steam, squinting up at him in the sun. 

"Yeah," said Hawkeye, shuffling his feet. "Thanks for getting my boots back."

"Well, you'll still have to get the rest of the shoes. I just figured this way we could…" she trailed off. "You know." Hawkeye nodded.

"Yeah." They were quiet again, staring at their feet. Hawkeye kicked up a tiny drift of snow.

"I'm, uh, not going to kiss you this time."

"That's okay, there's always next time." 

"In your dreams, Pierce." 

"Alright," he sighed dramatically. "I guess I'll settle for a hug." She smiled in spite of herself as he wrapped her in his arms and kissed the top of her head. They were both quiet for a minute, just holding each other, before Hawkeye spoke into her hair. "What are you going to do?"

When she sighed, it traveled through his chest. "I'm going to drive home. Walk my dogs. Talk to Charles, probably. Have something to eat. Call the nurse who subbed for me and get her reports. Then before I go to bed, I'll write a letter to Helen inviting her to come visit me in Boston."

Hawkeye pulled back to look at her. "You're not going to Virginia to see her?"

She made a face. "I would, but then Charles would have to take care of the dogs. Can you imagine that? He'd go completely bald with rage."

He snorted. “You know, once Helen gets here, I think maybe you two should talk. Tell her how you feel.” 

“Maybe you should talk to BJ once _he_ gets here. Tell him how _you_ feel.”

“…Maybe you should go soak your head.” Margaret laughed so hard that she snorted, which made Hawkeye laugh too. Once they had calmed down, Margaret wiped her eyes and sighed.

“I guess I’d better get going.”

“One more hug for the road.” She sniffed but seemed glad he’d brought it up first. 

“I’m not going to go into hug withdrawal,” she said into his chest.

“You never know. It’s awfully cold out there.”

“Hawkeye?”

“Yeah.”

“If it all goes south with Helen, can I come stay here?”

“Sure. My dad’ll be happy to have someone else to bully out of being a sad sack.” She laughed and pulled away. 

“Nobody bullies a Houlihan,” she said as she climbed into the car.

“Except a Pierce!” Hawkeye yelled through the glass. She rolled her eyes and waved at him pointedly, but she was still smiling as she put the car in gear. At the end of the driveway, she stopped abruptly and rolled down her window.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I hope we don’t see each other again too soon!” she yelled. 

Hawkeye laughed. “Me neither!” She grinned and ducked back in. Hawkeye watched her car get smaller and smaller until it crested the hill at the end of the road and disappeared. 

All at once it hit him again— _BJ is going to come down that road_ — and he suddenly had enough energy running under his skin to power the state of Texas, or to run three marathons and still have time to do open-heart surgery, or to tear down Penn Station with his bare hands and build a new one overnight. Hawkeye felt like he was going to explode where he stood. But instead of making a mess of innards for BJ to find at the end of the driveway, he ran back inside as fast as he could without slipping and scrubbed every dish in the sink until the hot water ran out. 

After half an hour, he dared to look out at the road: no BJ. He went back up and put clean sheets on his bed, then checked again: no BJ. He went back downstairs and tried to read, but couldn't focus for more than three lines, so he settled for scanning the headlines and cutting coupons out of the newspaper. He even stared out the window at the snow until his eyes hurt from the glare and his stomach was doing somersaults from the anticipation. Still no BJ. 

_This is ridiculous,_ said a little voice in his head that sounded like Margaret. _You're going to go blind._ He informed the voice that if he went blind, he wouldn't have to see BJ at all. 

_Don't be a jackass,_ said the mini-Margaret. _Get up and make yourself useful. He might not be here yet, but he’ll want to eat when he is._

So Hawkeye put on the Ink Spots and lost himself in making quiche Lorraine. He made himself sing along to the radio until he stopped feeling like there was static running through his veins, and pretended that it was just an ordinary day. Just a quiet Sunday afternoon. His father would be back soon from his house calls, and then they would discuss their patients, and then they'd eat dinner and read before bed. No visitors, no painful conversations, no failed marriages to think about, no tragic love. _A quiet Sunday,_ he repeated to himself as he pressed the dough into a pie pan. He found himself almost believing it, and felt a little better. Less like he was going to die from BJ-related stress. 

But by the time he put the quiche into the oven, the effort of not-thinking of the only thing he wanted to think about had exhausted him. He decided that it couldn't hurt to lie down on the sofa. If anything, it would probably make him feel better. _Just while the quiche cooks,_ he told himself. 

He closed his eyes and listened to the wind. 

_Come on, come on, we're going to be late,_ Hawkeye said. 

_Keep your shirt on, Hawk,_ BJ replied, trying to tuck the cuffs of his scrubs into his boots. _We'll make it on time._

_We might not if you don't get your goddamn size fifteens and a mask on. We're the guests of honor, we can't be late._

_If you're so worried about it, you tie my mask for me._ BJ stood up and Hawkeye felt as though he were being pulled forward like a magnet, which was how he always felt around BJ. 

He had only gotten the bottom ties done when BJ said _wait, close your eyes,_ and took Hawkeye's face in his hands. 

_What is it?_ BJ just smiled and kissed both of Hawkeye's eyelids. 

_For luck._ Hawkeye smiled back at him. _You'd better finish tying my mask— I thought you were the one who was dying to get moving,_ said BJ. Hawkeye was too happy to make a snarky comment. He was about to step away when BJ said, _Aren't you forgetting something, mister?_ and reeled him in by the sleeve of his coat. 

_Beats me._

_The surgeon general frowns upon maskless operations, Doctor Pierce._ BJ tugged him impossibly closer and pulled a mask from his pocket. Hawkeye tried to protest that he could put his own on, but BJ ignored him and reached around Hawkeye's head. _Let me._ His eyes crinkled at the corners, which meant he was smiling. Hawkeye found that he was still too happy to crack a joke.

Together they put on their matching navy blue coats from the Sears Roebuck catalogue and shut the door behind them. Hand in hand, they strolled down the driveway, where a white horse was waiting for them. BJ mounted it first and pulled Hawkeye up as though he weighed less than air. He settled down with his arms clasped around BJ's waist, chest molded to BJ's spine. Then they were flying down the driveway, past the road that led to the pond, over the bridge that led to Tommy's house, though an open field. The snow should have crunched under the horse's hooves, but all Hawkeye heard was the wind whistling past them, and BJ's surprised laughter. 

Hawkeye felt joy beyond what he really needed or deserved. In real life, the feeling would have been extravagant, undeserved, a cause for guilt. But as Hawkeye pressed his cheek to BJ's back and the stars whispered overhead, it felt simple. Easy. 

  
  


When he woke up, the light was starting to fade, the oven was smoking, and the whole house smelled like burnt cheese and onions. 

As he ran into the kitchen, Hawkeye took a brief interlude from panicking and cursing his stupidity to hate himself for how his first instinct was to run to the window and see if there was a strange car parked in the driveway, and then a second, briefer interlude to be relieved that there hadn't been any car. 

He yanked the oven open and fanned the blackened quiche in an attempt to make it cool, but it only made the smoke worse. Hawkeye decided that the quiche could go to hell, dumped it into the sink, and ran cold water over it.

He ran around the house opening every window, then the back door, then the front one, trying desperately not to think about how BJ was going to get there any minute and nothing would be perfect, before he remembered that he hadn't gotten the window in the kitchen. He dashed back in and tried to open it— but it was stuck. He pulled. Nothing. He braced his foot against the cabinet and leaned back with all his weight. Nothing. 

"Jesus motherfucking goddamn—" It had iced over from the outside. 

Hawkeye shoved his boots on, not bothering to lace them, and jogged out to try and chip the ice from the frame. Once he got there, he realized that he wasn’t wearing gloves, and that just poking at it with his elbow wasn’t going to be enough. He looked around for something he could use as a tool and found only what used to be his brown dress shoes, at which point he remembered that he had never brought in the rest of his shoes from the yard. But a man had to have priorities in desperate times, or something like that, so he grabbed his dress shoe and started hacking away at the ice. 

“Comeoncomeoncomeon, _”_ he muttered to himself as he swung the shoe again and again. _God, if you’re listening, I know you don’t like me but that’s okay because I don’t think much of you either._ _I know I haven't been perfect, but at least I tried to be good, even when things were less than good and by that I mean abysmal, and like I said I don't believe in you but BJ is going to be here soon and if it can't be perfect it has to be pretty fucking close so pleasepleaseplease—_ the window cracked open. Hawkeye grinned and picked up the pace.

_Just a little more and—_

Tires crunched in the ice. Hawkeye froze, wondering if he was imagining it. No— there was the car grinding to a halt. He counted seven beats of silence before someone got out of the car and slammed the door shut. He held his breath and reminded himself that it could be his father, home from work. But the stride of the person moving up the path was too long to be his father’s, not enough of a shuffle. 

He crept around the side of the house, still not breathing, and stopped at the corner. There, on the front steps, peering through the half-open front door, was BJ. 

He’d kept the mustache, and wore the same navy blue coat Hawkeye remembered, but with an unfamiliar orange hat jammed over his ears. His boots were new, and so was the suitcase at his feet. He looked as nervous and out of place as he did on the side of the road, fixing a Jeep on his first day in Korea, but also like he couldn’t possibly belong anywhere else. 

Hawkeye's organs became planets, each of them a piece of a solar system with BJ at the center, each of them turning faster and faster until he felt like he was burning up; he couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move— he spoke. “BJ.”

BJ turned and his whole face split into a grin. “Hawk! There you are,” he said, as if it was inevitable that Hawkeye would come to find him, and started moving down the stairs towards him. “I was looking for you.”

“Me too,” Hawkeye said, already moving up the path towards him. “Me too.”

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes and acknowledgments time! When I started writing this in July, I had no hope I'd ever finish it, let alone actually show it to a bunch of people who would leave me lovely comments and tell me that this story meant something to them. It wouldn't have been possible without all of you, so thank you if you're reading this. Thanks also and especially to the incomparable A.S. for editing this and for sharing one single brain cell with me; and to Hazel and Hannah, who saw this in its incoherent outline phase but still went "Sounds good!" 
> 
> Also, this fic has its own [playlist!](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5XqNVceboq45qIigkoAXsp?si=4DhteWveSc2LBAchzU8fjw) Let me know if you have songs to add, or just come and say hello @dykemulcahy on tumblr.


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